Using E-portfolios for active citizenship, lifelong
learning and community resilience
Sharon Zivkovic, Roger Harris & Peter Willis
Centre for Research in Education, Equity and Work
University of South Australia
Our argument
 Community resilience - requires diverse community
stakeholders collaborating on addressing community issues
and opportunities
 Requires a trans-disciplinary social learning approach – but
difficult to implement
 A more integrated and holistic approach to
assessment of education for
sustainability programs required
Tilbury et al. 2005: 38
 … competency-based
training and industrydominated training
packages tend to ……
fragment the knowledge
and skills required for
sustainability into
compartmentalised,
decontextualised and
measurable units.
… the current TP model may
prove inadequate to engage
stakeholders in the learning
required for change towards
sustainability. This would suggest
that policymakers should not rely
solely on Training Package reform
to secure sustainability outcomes.
Other integration and
intervention strategies beyond
Training Packages could be
developed and explored.
Our approach
 An e-portfolio system for active citizenship



and community building
Community Capacity Builders (CCB)
Community Leadership Program (CLP)
Participants:
acquire skills and knowledge for developing collaborative
community capacity-building projects
bridge their projects to strategic plans of governments
participate in community governance activities
Project of state and national significance – fits many
priorities
What are e-portfolios?
 ‘dynamic, developmental spaces representing
your professional "self" on the Web’ (PSU)
 Challis (2005) highlights their features as:
- selective and structured collections of information
- gathered for specific purposes and showing/evidencing one’s
accomplishments and growth which are
- stored digitally and managed by appropriate software
- developed by using appropriate multimedia and customarily
within a web environment, and
- retrieved from a website, or delivered by CD-ROM or DVD
Our research
 Small seed grant from UniSA
 Partnership with the City of Onkaparinga
 Desktop research, and interviews with

-
12 participants trialling e-portfolios through 2012
Research activities:
identifying the most appropriate software and host
developing a user guide
piloting the e-portfolio
surveying participants and City of Onkaparinga staff
reporting and disseminating the findings
7 Community Capacity Builders’ Hats
 In groups, select a community issue/opportunity to work on
 Develop a trans-disciplinary strategy for addressing your
issue or opportunity by looking at the issue through 7
perspectives: welfare reform; learning; health; business;
sustainability; decision-making; collaborative planning
 Identify what digital files and other features you could
include in an e-Portfolio to showcase your proposed project
to a potential stakeholder, or to use your
work in a recognition of prior learning
(RPL) process
 Report back to the main group