E-portfolios in lifelong learning

The current knowledge society requires its citizens to continuously maintain and update existing knowledge and competences and thus engage in lifelong learning. Acquiring key competences, such as digital, intercultural and communicative competences is crucial to keep up with the fast changing ways of society. As people need to combine their competence development with work and family life, they need flexibility in content and logistics. Consequently, informal learning and social learning in networks play an important role in this. However, it might be difficult to get their informally acquired competences recognized. In this paper we describe how an e-portfolio could assists learners in gathering, maintaining and organizing their informal learning and competences in order to show and share this with others and present how this is implemented in the TRAILER e-portfolio.