This session will report on the tentative introduction of e-portfolio concepts to a community IT Hub on a large housing estate in Southern England as a means of introducing and illustrating the challenges of using e-portfolios outside the formal sector. Although users of the Hub have a wide range of IT skills and practices, the use of e-portfolio tools for the development of an employment-focused online identity was unfamiliar. There were many challenges, not least the lack of familiarity many people have with the function and uses of a CV, let alone an e-portfolio. Before e-portfolio practice can be developed it is necessary to develop CV making skills. Furthermore in some community learning contexts where there are multiple indices of exclusion there is a suspicion of compulsion and a host of competing agencies and aims: employment, social entrepreneurship, community and voluntary service, democratisation of participation, getting off benefits, formalising learning and normalisation. Questions of trust are not merely formal software development concerns. They are human concerns. In "life wide" learning we might ask, where are the shared third spaces, beyond the panoptic gaze?

While e-Portfolios are intended to help maximise the contribution that individuals are able to make to society and to maximise the benefit individuals are able to gain from society, the field is complex, politicised and linked with personal identity management strategies. This session will address questions of social exclusion, formal and informal learning and personal digital identity management. If one of the aims of lifelong learning is to "Keep them in school!" and even at retirement "It doesn’t stop there!", we observe that all people are under tremendous pressure from those who are extremely ICT literate. Is the small step of making a CV one way to help? 

I have lived in Oxford since 1983.