Next Play for LinkedIn - an ePortfolio in every classroom

Next Play for LinkedIn - an ePortfolio in every classroom

              

Next Play for LinkedIn:          

 LinkedIn can and should be in every secondary and university classroom in the world, but it needs to add one more tool – an ePortfolio.  I know because I am an education futurist who, for 20 years, has passionately advocated the benefits of One ePortfolio for Life, and An ePortfolio for All.  And I have been promoting LinkedIn to university students in Malaysia and China and Oman as their official web presence when they become job-seekers.  I tell them:  Google is watching you and you need to establish a positive professional digital identity to counterbalance your party-pictures on Facebook.  

 An ePortfolio tool is both a digital archive and a presentation tool – allowing people to capture evidence of competencies and present them in different ways to different audiences.  It is both a product and a process supporting personal responsibility for learning over a lifetime.  The product may be a variety of presentations with evidence of achievements – papers, transcripts, presentations, references.  The process includes creativity, digital literacy skills, critical thinking, and reflection – all of the 21st Century skills set out by the World Economic Forum.  An ePortfolio can account for a person’s entire formal, informal and lifelong learning. An ePortfolio allows a person to say “here’s who I am and what I can do, and here’s the evidence!”  My professional ePortfolio is my website:  www.FuturEd.com.

 My digital CV, however, is on LinkedIn.  That’s what LinkedIn is now – an online resume for professionals.  LinkedIn was where I was discovered for this great job I have in Qatar as Higher Education Expert Consultant.  But it has limitations.  A LinkedIn ePortfolio tool could link my CV, including digital artefacts like papers and presentations, with my 50 skills and endorsements and give me different presentation options.  It may seem easy and obvious, but LinkedIn doesn’t do it yet and that’s why ePortfolio is the Next Play for LinkedIn.

 Bill Gates, in Business Insider, says combining Microsoft’s productivity expertise with LinkedIn’s social networking know-how creates an opportunity to become the center of people’s professional lives.  It is a much bigger opportunity than that:  it can become the centre of people’s digital identity.

 Jeffrey Weiner, LinkedIn CEO says the merger between LinkedIn and Microsoft will “change the way the world works”.  It can do more!  It can change how the world learns – extending the use of LinkedIn down into the education system and out into the realm of lifelong learning.  

 Peter Cohen, in Forbes Magazine, says that Microsoft wasted $26.2 billion to buy LinkedIn.  He’s wrong.  Using Microsoft’s professional cloud services with LinkedIn’s professional networking services as just the starting point, the merged entity can easily:

  1. Generate entire new services and customers: the entire education community;
  2. Create new offerings and new products for existing customers, who are lifelong learners; and
  3. Produce a whole new class of products, beginning with ePortfolio tools and digital identity services.

 Who needs these new products?  The 433 million LinkedIn users do.  But millions more will be added as education innovators succeed in:

  • Creating Uber-like learning systems with mobile apps and tracking systems, online assessments and blockchain authentication
  • Introducing micro-credentials and digital qualifications into credentialing systems
  • Promoting more accountable, authentic, competence-based and evidence-based assessment of learning
  • Motivating and assisting people to monitor and develop 21st century digital literacy skills
  • Maximizing the return on investment in existing Learning Management Systems and ePortfolio systems already operating within education institutions
  • Increasing access to quality education for all with personalized learning portals
  • Increasing the ROI in training by providing evidence-based demonstration of learning
  • Empowering people of all ages to recognize and use their vast banks of non-formal learning
  • Efficiently linking learning systems to recruitment and HR systems
  • Championing lifelong learning, digital citizenship and “smart” people

 This needs to be done quickly.  Already Sony is working on an education and testing platform powered by blockchain.  Already Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerburg have produced personalized learning systems with algorithms.  Already machine learning is managing our curriculum and careers.  This is a chance for LinkedIn and Microsoft to create an innovative space in the middle of these innovations. 

 In the long term, this will generate lifelong users and multiple income-generating alternatives for LinkedIn as education systems and governments come to realize the value of a unique digital identity for each and all citizens – generated and managed inside an ePortfolio enhanced LinkedIn using Microsoft productivity expertise and cloud services.  Beyond being the center of people’s professional lives, then, LinkedIn becomes the centre of how people acquire, manage and use learning over a lifetime within their unique and secure digital archive of achievements and competencies.  

 In the immediate term, this will substantially promote use of learning services featured on LinkedIn.  With their LinkedIn ePortfolio tools, people will realize what the competencies they need to acquire and through Lynda.com, find learning providers.  With blockchain technology, the validated competencies they acquire can be added to their ePortfolio archives.   What makes this critical is that the assertions about competencies can be validated.  What makes this unique is that the LinkedIn ePortfolio and digital identity will be owned and managed by the individual – not a corporation or a school or education department.  People will be able to have one trustworthy, transparent, updatable and sharable ePortfolio for life.  On LinkedIn. 

 To the new LinkedIn ePortfolio, then, we add a host of tools to help people structure their thinking about what they’ve learned and can now do from types of environments:  tools to help manage the learning from international study and travel, from time out of the workforce as a homemaker, from non-formal workplace training, the list is almost endless, from political office.  The tools should be competence-based, evidence-based and linked to existing taxonomies, making them effective and efficient for those who “produce” and those who “consume” the information in an ePortfolio. 

 And that’s where education comes in.  Employers currently use LinkedIn data for recruiting, so educators and trainers should help learners to produce good digital evidence of competences and good ePortfolios as they leave school to enter the workforce. The place to start is with educators themselves:  the first target customers of this LinkedIn ePortfolio strategy. 

 So, with this Next Play for LinkedIn:

  • Educators will use LinkedIn in the classroom as evidence of learning for their students and themselves – generating a huge new audience for LinkedIn;
  • Students and employees will use LinkedIn to showcase achievements, conduct skills gap analysis, and to plan to fill learning gaps – reinforcing use of the LinkedIn learning options;
  • Education systems can measure learning and demonstrate accountability -  providing evidence that students acquire “Graduate Attributes” and transferrable, “soft” 21st century skills;
  • Entire corporations or nations may generate and manage digital identities to maximize human capital investment – “smart cities” need “smart citizens”;
  • Creative people can use almost every app on their smartphone to support their ePortfolio – LinkedIn will connect to everything.

This is just the beginning of all the potential benefits of an ePortfolio tool for LinkedIn customers.  For millions of people, a LinkedIn account becomes eMe.  For lots of people – like refugees and school non-completers - without formal academic credentials, LinkedIn is evidence of competence.  For universities, it becomes a quality assurance mechanism.  For LinkedIn, it becomes an enormous lifelong marketing tool.

 I know what to do and where to start.  Who do I talk to? 

Serge Ravet

President at Reconnaître - Open Recognition Alliance

7y

Hi Kathryn, Good read. I agree that something 'LinkedIn-like' could play the role of an ePortfolio. The only problem I see with LinkedIn is the lack of control individuals have on their personal data, in particular the inability to select the services they want. Everything is under the control of one provider. I believe that we can do much better using Open Badges, that are fully under the control of the individuals. In fact, we could reinvent LinkedIn and many new services using the unique properties of Open Badges.

Now that I am an educator as well as a filmmaker, I promote the benefits of the e-folio to my students. Some are elementary school age, high school pre graduates and university level... I bring it up with them all! Great work Kathryn

Jim Milton

Chief Strategy Officer | SaaS Exec & Advisor

7y

Universities representing 5M+ students and alumni have taken this strategy in their own hands and partnered with Portfolium.com to ensure everyone has an ePortfolio that is on the radar of employers / matches competent students to jobs and internships.

Marcel Haagsma M.Ed. MA

Teacher Educator at ITE & RUN-EU educational programme coordinator Meppel & Emmen bij NHL Stenden Hogeschool

7y

What can I say? Completely agree. I think LinkedIn CEO Weiner should act now!

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