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EIfEL and Elgg establish a partnership for ePortfolios

EIfEL (European Institute for E-Learning) has established a partnership with Elgg to improve the range of services to its members and to a series of European projects in which EIfEL is involved.
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Elgg will bring a social ePortfolio environment to two European projects: GEARS (Getting Engineering Ready and Active for Strategy) and KEYPAL (Key Skills Portfolio Assisted Learning). The “social” character of Elgg, and its ability for networking and community building are key aspects in extending the services already provided by iWebfolio, Nuventive’s ePortfolio solution which is offered to EIfEL members.

For Serge Ravet, CEO of EIfEL, "this new partnership is important for us as it provides an opportunity to experiment the interoperability framework on which EIfEL has been working for several months leading the EPICC project (European Portfolio Initiatives Coordination Committee)."

EIfEL, which is actively involved in interoperability and innovation in the field of ePortfolio, is promoting an interoperability framework that should allow each individual to choose the ePortfolio platforms, tools and services of their choice, open source and commercial.

David Tosh, of Elgg, looks forward to the closer collaboration between Elgg and EIfEL, and says "This is a great opportunity to further expand Elgg's functionality, ensuring users will feel the benefit at the services level. It is an exciting time for those interested in ePortfolios and personal learning landscapes."

Elgg will be participating in the upcoming ePortfolio plugfest and International ePortfolio Conference organized by EIfEL. The event takes place in Cambridge, UK, on October 26th to 28th 2005, and brings together experts and practitioners from across the world – 24 countries are currently represented - to celebrate the remarkable progress being made by the ePortfolio movement worldwide with an increasing number of countries, regions and institutions integrating the ePortfolio into their education and training policies and practice. http://www.eife-l.org/portfolio/ep2005

More information: www.europortfolio.org
Contact: Angela BAKER ePortfolio Manager
angela.baker@eife-l.org
tel: +33 (0) 1 43 56 20 79
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About EIfEL
EIfEL (European Institute for E-Learning) is a non-profit European professional association created in 2001 and headquartered in France, whose mission is to support the continuing professional development of individuals and the transformation of organisations to build a knowledge economy and a learning society. EIfEL is at the forefront of eLearning and ePortfolio in Europe, supporting organisations and public authorities in developing the learning policies of the 21st Century. EIfEL is leading Europortfolio, the European consortium for the ePortfolio (www.europortfolio.org) and numerous projects linked to ePortfolios. EIfEL has also organised and co-organised numerous ePortfolio events in Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Contact: Philippe Verstraete
e-mail
Tel: +33 3 8643 1343 www.eife-l.org

About Elgg
The concept behind Elgg is to develop a fully customizable learning landscape: a hybrid of weblogging, e-portfolios and social networking. This combination of features will provide an engaging environment for learners to create their own learning space and then connect to others, forming online communities of learning.

Elgg is a product of Curverider LTD.

Contact: David Tosh
dave@elgg.net
Fax: + 44 845 280 2381
http://elgg.net

Download the press release.

For those interested in the direction of Elgg we have released a rough draft of our second phase roadmap. Although we need to firm this up it will still give you an idea of where Elgg is heading.

Exciting times ahead!

You may have noticed a new tab when you log in to the system - Your Resources. This currently contains RSS aggregation functions: you can subscribe to feeds and display their posts individually or as part of an aggregated interface similar to the weblog friends page. Also similarly to weblogs, you can see all the feeds everyone is subscribed to, or view feeds for a particular user.

There is more functionality to come (including tag autodiscovery and access restrictions), but we thought we'd make it available for you to play around with.

Astute users may have noticed the lack of a 'your subscriptions' menu item in the resources tab. This has now been corrected, and you can now click 'your subscriptions' to add a new feed to your resources.

The Elgg team spent last week at EIFE-L's ePortfolio 2005 conference, where they participated in the interoperability plugfest and presented the learning landscape concept. Slides and additional materials will be made available shortly, but you may wish to read the reflections Ben and Dave recorded during their stay (sometimes in front of a live audience!).

The draft phase 2 roadmap is online, and we invite you to examine it for a glimpse of what's to come - and as ever, you can download the software from Eduforge.