The Best Platform for School Portfolios

Over the last few weeks I've been working with several clients focused on Career and Technical Education. One of the projects involved helping State Directors of CTE craft a vision and a set of principles to guide development of CTE into the future.

The other project focused on helping one state understand and define for themselves what it means to be 'college and career ready' (a new jargon that is getting more and more focus and will possibly be made into policy nationwide.

During these sessions, as has been the case for more than 10 years now, there was considerable conversation about the need for, and value of, digital learning portfolios.

As I listened to these conversations it became clearer and clearer to me that the perfect platform for wide spread adoption of a digital online portfolio for schools and learning already exists and is used by more than 300 million people. It's called Facebook.

It's so obvious to me that every person that has a profile is already used to creating and sharing some part of themselves with other people - mostly friends - but that this platform can easily be morphed into one that will support digital files and media of all types - allowing people of all ages to share and show-off what they have produced in the context of learning.

Facebook was originally conceived as a tool for people involved in a school to stay in touch with other people they knew from that school. As it has morphed into a social media platform for people of all walks of life the concept is very well accepted and well used (people spend more time on Facebook than they do on just about any other web site).

It makes perfect sense to me that every profile can have an option to add a section specifically designed to 'show-off' all forms of self-expression and learning.

If I was an app developer I'd develop that app immediately!

Rates of Change - What does all this mean for public schooling?

One of the arguments I have for re-inventing public schooling is the rapid rate of changes taking place in society. Schools and schooling are the most disconnected institutions we have on the planet. By disconnected I mean, what is taking place inside of schools is disconnected from what is taking place outside of schools.

Sure there has been a push to get technology into schools - but that technology has been viewed and used under the same fundamental operating principle that is driving all schooling (control and compliance) and the methodologies technology has been applied to are the same fundamental concepts as traditional teaching (sit and get; drill and practice).

There is a large amount of data from many sectors of our economy and society that demonstrates increasing rates of change moving towards exponential rates of change. We see increasing rates of change in global population, in consumption of resources, and increasing pollution. We see the same types of changes in the use of technologies like fax machines, cell phones, computers, and the internet. The amount of data being digitized and stored on computers somewhere in the world has followed a similar curve.

Over the last 100 years the system of public schooling (including colleges and universities) has changed some but very little compared to the rest of society. This gap, which we can call an Opportunity Gap, continues to grow. The longer we wait to make necessary changes the worse it will get. And this gap actually explains a lot of what people are experiencing today in public schooling.

Every organization in the world is facing the challenge of managing within this environment of rapid change. In the competitive environment the amount of pressure on companies to adopt and stay competitive is quite significant. Product life cycles for consumer electronics companies in some competitive markets have shrunk from 18 – 24 months to around 6 months and some companies complete the entire cycle from concept, through development, through to the end of a products life in that time period.

More significant for leaders and managers of organizations (especially large ones) is having an understanding of the impact this kind of environment has on ‘how they manage.’ How you manage in an organization that is moving fast – staying up to speed with the rate of change – is different from how you manage in an organization that is moving slower. And managing a slower moving organization that is attempting to close the Opportunity Gap is different still.

Partly because of the fact that schools have been kept separate from the rest of society, and partly because of the slow moving changes within the schooling system, the managers and leaders in that environment have not felt the same kinds of pressures as business leaders. Until recently society has not demanded these leaders to have the same kind of competence. But that luxury is quickly being eroded. Pressure from the outside is growing and the skill sets of school leaders will be challenged significantly.

Here's a short video that makes the argument for re-inventing schools better than I could with pages or writing: