Assistant editor’s introduction

Citation

Shurville, S. (2008), "Assistant editor’s introduction", Campus-Wide Information Systems, Vol. 25 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/cwis.2008.16525daa.001

Assistant editor’s introduction

Article Type: Assistant editor’s introduction From: Campus-Wide Information Systems, Volume 25, Issue 4

In this special issue, we are proud to present a selection of papers from the e-portfolio 2007 conference which was held in Maastricht in October 2007. The issue is guest edited by Professor Rob Koper and Dr Steven Verjans of the Open University of The Netherlands (OUNL). Professor Koper is director of learning technologies research at the OUNL. His group studies and develops models and technologies to support lifelong competence development. Professor Koper is well known for his involvement in developing Learning Networks for Lifelong Learning and IMS Learning Design (www.imsglobal.org/ldsummit/2.%20Rob%20Koper%20IMS-meeting-Heerlen-Nov-2006.pdf). Recently, Professor Koper has been the powerhouse behind the multinational TENCompetence project (www.tencompetence.org). He is also a long term member of our editorial board. Dr Verjans is Assistant Professor Educational Technology at OUNL. He is currently involved in the Development and Implementation programmes at the Educational Technology Expertise Centre of the OUNL. Within the implementation programme, he leads an internal OUNL project to design and developing the institution’s future electronic learning environment. The outcomes of this should be well worth waiting for. Dr Verjans maintains an insightful blog at http://stievie.blogspot.com/.

The e-portfolio initiative is important because it not only extends technical progress in e-learning but also applies this progress to broaden the socially inclusive aspects of education across the campus and beyond. Here, for example, you will find papers that specifically address the needs of disabled and older learners. You will also find papers that focus on the social and technical dimensions of embedding e-portfolios in countries, such as Bulgaria, that have been underrepresented in the e-learning literature. Both initiatives are key to developing equitable and global assess to online education.

Readers who are interested in such issues might like to pursue them in our sister journal Multicultural Education and Technology Journal (http://info.emeraldinsight.com/products/journals/journals.htm?id=metj). We also have upcoming special issues in the pipeline on e-assessment, e-learning in China and learner generated contexts that will explore related themes. Incidentally, if you would like to propose a future special issue of Campus-Wide Information Systems based upon a particular conference or theme, then please contact me at simon.shurville@unisa.edu.au.

Simon ShurvilleSchool of Computing and Information Science, University of South Australia, Australia