Betty Gilgoff

My blog has moved to http://bgilgoff.edublogs.org/. For more recent posts please visit me there.

With reference to

I've been thinking a lot lately about how overwhelming the amount of information on the internet is. There is so much I want to see, do and try out. How do I keep up with it all? This video raises some great points but the one I'm most curious about is the idea that because students are doing 26.5 hours a day worth of "stuff" therefore they have to be multi-tasking. This is an interesting phenomenon but I wonder if it is really true. Do we have to do all of these things: read web pages and facebook accounts, stay on our cell phones constantly connected to everyone, watch tv, read email, listen to music, study to cram for exams, write meaningless papers? Do we have to do them all particularly if the cost of doing them is that we are constantly strapped for time. And, possibly that we maybe don't do any of them nearly as well.

I've always had a negative reaction to the concept of "multi-tasking" partly because it often seems to be an excuse for people to not attend to what is going on around them.  "Oh, I'm multi-tasking" has become an acceptable explanation for someone sitting at a meeting answering their email instead of fully participating in a discussion, or for a student checking up on facebook happenings during a lecture.  Is this multi-tasking, or is it simply (potentially rude) lack of engagement.  If we look at Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow Theory, I'd suggest that ideally we're striving in anything we do to do it completely. We want to learn to attend to whatever we involve ourselves in with as much of our being as we can.  The more we are 100% engaged, the closer we are to being "in flow", an idealized state of true understanding, engagement and expertise. Where does "multi-tasking" fit with this and how does the bombardment of information, toys, networks, and social media help or hinder moving towards this ideal? How does web2.0 and the idea of a mobile world help or hinder real engagement and real learning.  With all this that is coming at us are we becoming more of surface learners and surface thinkers only?   Are we really taking the time to stop and learn and explore things, tools, ideas and concepts in depth?   How might this networked world be distracting us?

So I've been at my "new" job for almost a year and instead of it getting easier, I'd have to say that it is honestly getting harder.  That isn't to say that I'm not having fun. I clearly am.  In some ways this is a dream job.  Often I work from home because the internet  makes it possible for me to do my job efficiently and effectively from my home office . As I write this I'm sitting at my desk in my house, looking out at Cypress mountain and listening to the neighbors dog bark (well, that part isn't so great.) It is a beautiful sunny day but I've been at my desk all day.  Although I'm working physically here alone,  all day I've been working quite closely with Julia my colleague to  plan our next TLITE theme day.   We've emailed back and forth probably 20 or 30 times today. Some of the planning we've been working on has been with documents posted for her and I to share on Google Docs and Spreadsheets. As we've worked, we've accessed our office staff to ask for copies of drafts of posters or to clarify room bookings and other information.  Once, as I struggled to assign a computer lab to a particular working session, I paused as I thought about how to most efficiently find the information I needed: which one of six sfu labs was the Mac computer lab? I thought of emailing to ask, but then with only a few clicks instead I was able to find a detailed map of the Surrey campus floor plan, click on one of the rooms in question, and presto, up came a set of detailed pictures of the room.  It took me seconds to determine which one was the Mac lab and I was back to my planning.  The internet has its uses and makes the distances I work across

But now I've done what I can on that event and I should be taking a break to stretch and go for a walk.  Afterall the sun will set soon.  But first, I want to take a few minutes to pare down my email.  I have 386 emails currently in my inbox.  None are spam.  Already I've read and responded to anything urgent or requiring a reply. For the most part I'm pretty good staying on top of that. No, most of the 386 emails are emails with tidbits of information that I'm fascinated by. WIndows into the world of what is possible out there because of web2.0.  A more prudent person would simply delete them all and go for that walk.  But I'm addicted.  I love to know what is going on, where people are spending their time on the net, what new phenomenons are taking hold, what's being developed, and what is being collaborated on.  That I'll miss a cool site or a new way of connecting by an unexamined delete of a message is not a risk I can take.

So what does it all mean: Well, my most recent interest is in social media. Yesterday I went to visit a 2nd year TLITE student to learn a bit about how is field study work is going.  We talked about his work and then moved on to what he's learning and where he is going from here.  What he's gotten most excited about are the things he's learning by as he called it "peeking into other people's electronic filing cabinets."  By targeting educators that he admires and networking with their del.icio.us sites, he's learning about what they're finding that is interesting.  This has taken him from his own focus on his own classroom and his own teaching practice to an interest in what is happening globally with computers. 

Is Theme Day attendance mandatory?

The answer to the question is not really a simple yes or no.  While SFU generally as a policy doesn't require attendance, the philosophy behind self-directed learning definitely includes a curiousity to investigate and learn from opportunities which present themselves.  Several of the capacities speak indirectly to this as well. For example being a knowledgeable educator, a critical practitioner and a reflective practitioner, all require involvement with current educational issues and trends so that the learner has opportunities for learning about and working with new ideas, current thinking and new ideas,   As well, the capacities in TLITE include being a supportive colleague in both your school community and your TLITE community.  To be supportive requires that you actively participate in community.  Having said that, being an autonomous learner always requires that you are taking charge of your learning. Clearly a conference type event is not going to meet the learning needs of all of the participants and so each of them will need to decide for themselves how they will make best use of they day.  For many the speakers and planned activities will be well suited to their learning needs. For others, the collaborative space and discussion times will be more valuable, depending who they are able to connect to and how they approach the day.  For some, self study time at home might be more beneficial.  So weighing in all of the factors, each individual learner will need to decide in conjunction with her/his mentor how mandatory the Theme day is.

Having said all of that, our mission in planning Theme Days is to offer opportunities which will meet the needs of the learners in TLITE.  When learners feel that they are not meeting their learning needs we would welcome those learners involvement in the planning process.

Above all else, life happens. There will always be times when no matter how much a learner wants to participate in any particular "community of practice" we have to take care of our selves and our families.  Given that, again students should be in communication with their mentors with regards to what is going on for them.

Thank you Dave Sands.  Last week I heard Dave Sands, Principal of Castle Park Elementary School in Coquitlam, B.C., make an excellent presentation to TLITE teachers in Maple Ridge on Internet safety.  His philosophy in a nutshell is that this generation of children, adolescents and students are on the internet.  They are using on-line chat programs and connecting in a way that we in the "older generation" could have never imagined was going to be possible.  Social networking, blogging, and chatting online are very much a part of their world and so if we want to make it safe for them, the only option is to get involved in the online communities that they are creating. Dave presented a very convincing and sound argument. 

I agree whole heartedly and welcome the call to get involved in digital communities.   Whether we like it or not, digital communities are very much a part of our children's lives. Just as  I believe that to make our "non-virtual" neighbourhoods safe, to make any virtual community safe, adults need to be present.  Our absence, such that trying to ban or block participation, only serves to create a Lord of the Flies situation.  If my 13 year old daughter creates a community on Facebook that invites in only her other young adolescent friends, as well perhaps as a few "unknown lurkers" who get there by being a friend of a friend, what kind of an environment does that create for the time that she chooses, or is allowed to spend there? Would I let her spend even an hour of her afternoons after school in a real life community with only 78 of these people with no adults present? Definitely not especially on an ongoing basis.  I prefer to know that adults, including teachers, are around. I like to know that they are occasionally peeking in to see what is going on, perhaps eavesdropping now and then to monitor the language, curb the crescendo of inappropriate language or topics of discussion, perhaps by adding a comment or even more blatantly challenging something that has been said.   I like to know that some adult that I know may question the presence of an unknown stranger.  I like to think that if my child posts inappropriate pictures or too much information, someone in my community may notice even if I'm having busy week and not looking over her shoulder often enough.  I too agree to play my part in being an adult presence in the communities in which several of my younger students and friends are a part.

In a sense facebook, myspace, flicker, scrablog, blogger.com, even twitter, are all  a kind of eportfolio.  In these sites people, both adults and younger people, choose to post information about themselves, be it thoughts, photos, resumes, histories or personal data.  There are ways of making it all somewhat anonymous (if needed), having it be safe, reasonable information and I think it is important that we discuss this with our children and teach them how to post appropriately.  They need to have guidance to learn the dangers and pitfalls. They need to be allowed to test out their ideas about what is suitable and to have a real audience to provide feedback.   While it is possible to do this by having them post on "safe" sites, it is also important that they have some access and control to learn to manage their own data in the communities and places where they are already choosing to participate. 

The promise of technology even in teaching and learning, I thought, was that it was going to make things easier and give us all more leisure time.  Often I wonder if it hasn't done the reverse. There are days when I open my email and find myself inundated with requests of my time to reconsider, explain or teach something.  From my email alone I am constantly swamped with information on new ideas for ways to use technology, new web pages to check out, articles to read, videos to view and causes to join. And all this before 7:30 am each day, before all those suggestions and ideas that I come across as I proceed through the rest of my day.  Instead of easier, it seems harder and harder to keep up with all that I am expected to know and do.  Gadgets, toys, new on-line tools, new vocabulary, faster speeds, overloads of information, lack of privacy, scams, a whole cyber world ....Yet something keeps me firmly on this path to continue to pursue innovative and meaningful ways to incorporate technology into teaching. Why?

For me the answer is simple: the things that my students are doing with technology clearly embody so many aspects of what I believe learning and education is all about.  Technology allows for the learning to be active. Almost regardless of what they are doing, my students who are embracing technology are constantly calling on and checking out their prior knowledge, they are constructing meaning, problem solving and engaging with others. Perhaps less certain, but still possibly, students are thinking critically, gaining a foundation of factual knowledge, understanding that knowledge within a conceptual framework, organizing and manipulating the knowledge and maybe even beginning to think about their thinking. Most definitely, they are most often self-directed about their learning.  Some of that learning may be enhanced when students have the opportunity to use the technology alongside teachers or mentors who are interested and engaged with what they are doing.  But undoubtedly, learning is happening and knowledge is being more freely shared in ways that make it accessible to all of us.

While I am not currently teaching in a K- 12 classroom, the learning I see in the adult learners completing SFU's TLITE Graduate Diploma program which I coordinate, is surprising similar to what I have seen with young children learning with computers. Like with children of any age, put a computer in a learner's hands and that learner will get actively involved in learning how to use it except that adults, unlike children, sometimes are less confident and need more encouragement to problem solve independently with that computer.  Generally though learners constantly test and check based on their prior knowledge of how things work to get the computer to do what they need.  They are highly motivated, involved, and self-directed. For anyone I've worked with, expectations and learning goals are exceeded and the students themselves feel highly successful.

More and more learning in education is moving towards making use of on-line tools.  Web 2.0 interactiveness makes it the perfect platform for engaging learners in constructing meaning. No longer are learners simply using the web to search and read, instead they are becoming actively involved in constructing knowledge by sharing ideas, joining groups, blogging, and adding to wikis.  They have opportunities to respond to ideas of others, think critically about what is presented and share their feedback in novel and creative ways. Within learning communities students engage in shared content and respond accordingly. On-line social networking is quickly becoming the norm rather than exception. All this interactiveness helps to check and encourage critical thinking, the gaining and understanding of factual knowledge, and certainly the organizing and manipulating of it.  Where students may still need some guidance is in making sure that how their understanding of the knowledge fits into a larger conceptual framework and with developing the metacognitive piece which educators have learned is essential in helping learning to occur.  The trick is to not get in the way.

As I think it through and learn more about the possibilities, I have come to believe that there is indeed hope for this endless treadmill of ways to use technology. There may be two keys to this. One may be in the open access movement that is sweeping through the academic and research institutions.  Loosely defined open access is free and immediate access to online scholarly research and information.  Philosophically this is about making what we know freely available to everyone as we come to know it.  In practice it is about inviting communities of learners into discussions and repositories which actually become the sources of our knowledge.  The second key may be the interactivity of  Web 2.0 that allows learning to move into the control of the learner.  The power of such things as wikis, rss feeds, mashups, podcasts, blogs, links, social networks, collaborative word processing programs,  tags, vlogs, networks, and open course ware is that students don't need to wait for experts to portion out or sanction what they need to know.  The tools to learning and accessing knowledge are no longer under the control of an elite academy.  In this new Web 2.0 world, the self-directed, motivated learner has it all.  Teaching with technology then, if done in a way that encourages autonomy and allows learners to embrace the possibility and potential of the web, is about opening up a new kind of life-long access to education that should be available to all. 

My last article in the December issue of CUE news was about building e-portfolios using on-line resources.   It focused largely on teaching students to create e-portfolios for their own learning. In this article I would like to focus on two important aspects of any portfolio, the reflective journal and organized dialogue, to look at how internet resources for writing and social networking can be used to enhance one's own teaching practice.  The underlying sub text here is quite simply that enhancing student learning is best done through improving one's teaching practice and that reflective journaling and organized dialogue are the basic building blocks for that.  Let me explain.

Teaching is a messy profession.  By that I don't just mean the paint and chalk dust that can easily cover one from head to toe, or the piles of papers, messages, books, and resources which up on any teacher's desk at the end of the day, or even the back rooms full of old computer hardware and boxes, disks and manuals from outdated software. I mean that teaching is messy because of the thinking process that must be engaged in to if one is to seriously consider improving one's teaching practice. It is impossible to teach without struggling through the mess of complexities of relationships, understandings, misunderstandings, demands, needs, skills, concepts, assumptions and worldviews. Today we're fortunate to have technologies which can help.

In the beginning of my career much of the sorting I did occurred by happenstance. Gradually, through trial and error, and with involvement in various graduate studies, I've learned to direct that struggle and discourse into more focused wanderings through reflective journaling and organized dialogue.  Through SFU’s TLITE Graduate Diploma Program I also started to use available on-line resources to organize and move my thinking to a higher level professionally. Initially this began with helping highly gifted students use meta-cognitive strategies to improve their learning.  While it may have impacted their learning, the greatest impact was clearly on my teaching.

Reflective journaling is a process in which one lays out one's thinking so that it can be examined and rethought.  I do my journaling on-line because I find that it adds a level of privacy and anonymity that helps me to write more honestly.  Somehow putting something on paper where it might be read by an unintended audience, for me, provides an unwanted censor in my own mind.  On-line, that disappears and I find that I can dig deeper to really get at the real assumptions and underlying beliefs that are steering my thinking.  It may seem like a contradiction then that once I've been able to write honestly, having written on-line makes it easier to share my writing, and thus my thinking. This is where on-line learning communities and social networks play a role.

To journal, I use Live Journal at http://www.live.journal.com because it is reliable and has a component of social networking built in.  I find it more convenient to journal on-line as opposed to single document files stored on my computer because on-line I can journal from anywhere and I don't need to worry about constantly storing and backing up files as I move from computer to computer or even platform to platform. There are many options for on-line sites such as Blogger.com, RelativeRecall.com, Jounalvillage.com or BallofDirt.com.  Criteria I use to assess a site include cost, privacy controls, ease of access, reliability, amount of advertising, and the type of audience that the site attracts. Ball of Dirt, for example, caters to travelers and so provides blog and photo space and a convenient way of updating others who are following your travels.  It is excellent for that but probably not the best place to connect with others regarding pedagogy. Live Journal does have a social networking component and although it is not specifically for teachers one could easily create a community of teachers within Live Journal if one already had a network of teacher friends doing the same. More frequently I've used Elgg.net because provides an already existent higher education community which I have been easily able to join into. The community feature allows users to start or join any number of communities of practice such as the CoP on E-Portfolios.

Beyond sharing one's on-line writing and joining or creating a community of practice, more recently I've begun to engage in a number of on-line networks which offer on-line courses and discussions.  Knowplace.ca is an excellent local example. KnowTIPS.ca is another as is SFU's SCoPE, only just coming available to current TLITE students. These sites use Moodle, an open source course management system, designed with educators in mind, to offer on-line courses which are designed with freedom beyond the "sage on the stage" style of teaching.  Participants can engage in discussions, read course material, access resources, videos, and links, engage in real time chats or make use of on-line elluminate white board meeting space. The possibilities are staggering and while many distributed learning programs are rapidly adopting this platform (a list of Canadian and BC moodle sites is available from http://moodle.org/sites/) I see the real value in being for the connection such sites can offer teachers who are willing to get involved and to use reflective journaling strategies to share their thinking and break down the isolation that our school walls can so easily create. It is through this type of involvement in social networking that teachers can make excellent use of on-line resources to improve their practice.

Karl Popper, one of the great 20th Century philosopher's of science, believed strongly in a theory of learning which at the highest level necessitated our working and sharing ideas.  He believed that it was only through shared knowledge and a "community of practice" could we ever really come to understand the accumulated wisdom of human kind.  In my mind the same is true for teaching. Through sharing our thoughts and idea, our struggles and successes we can add to the accumulated wisdom of our profession and each become better teachers.  On-line networks are providing new and easily accessible ways to make that happen.

For several years now I've been teaching students how to work with learning portfolios.  While porfolios are often tauted as an excellent way to assess student achievement, I've found that more importantly, portfolios are beneficial to the learner for self-assessment, for making choices about learning and for serving as a guide to becoming more autonomous and self-directed as a learner.  In 2001 I enrolled in the SFU Graduate Field Program TLITE course and from that began to keep my own personal learning portfolio, initially as a paper collection in a series of binders and then, more gradually, as an ePortfolio.  In creating my own, I've learned a great deal about on-line resources, issues around ePortfolios and tips and tricks to make them work. This year I'm teaching a grade 4/5 class.  Each of my students has developed his or her own ePortfolio and this with just eight good computers for all of the 225 students in the whole school!  In our class the ePortfolio project has become a key motivator, an essential organizer and a major "self and other" assessment tool.

Today with the on-line resources that are currently available ePortfolios are easy to teach, easy to use and easy to support.  For the basic ePortfolio I tend to have students use Keep Tool Kit, http://www.cfkeep.org, because it is free, on-line and hosted by the Knowledge Media Lab of the Carnegie Foundation, so reliable.  It is designed to provide templates for teaching and learning portfolios which means there are already standard sample templates to choose from although it is easy enough to design your own. To start younger students I typically design a simple template or "snapshot" which includes what I want the students to think about, and then "send" it to each student from my "dashboard" in Keep Tool Kit. Students then can easily open their dashboard once they've joined Keep Tool Kit and choose "edit". Their own editable webpage then opens and within each box on the page they can edit text, background color, text color, font and size. It is also easy to add pictures or even video to any box on the snapshot. From the main dashboard snapshots can then be "stitched"  together to form a series of web pages, all quite effective for any ePortfolio.

Another excellent resource is Elgg Learning Landscape, http://elgg.net, which also provides space for storing profile and portfolio information such as files, pictures and so on.  It too is easy to learn, though not open to students under 13 years of age without signed parent permission, and Elgg staff actually do monitor and follow through with this.  What is brilliant about Elgg is that it is more than just a place to build a portfolio. It is a place to build a whole learning community because it has excellent mechanisms for connecting people and also for providing each user with absolute control over access.  So in Elgg it is possible to link a Keep Tool Kit portfolio, add in profile information about oneself, upload files to save or share, create a blog individually or for a community of people, identify friends, monitor other blogs, and, the delightful part, set privacy controls which allow you to decide who sees what. Elgg is currently being used largely by university faculty and students but is an excellent resource for learners of any age.

Of course once my students get ePortfolios up and running, I like to encourage them to begin to use the portfolio to document their thinking through their writing.  While Keep or especially Elgg can work for that, for my younger students I want something simplier and so I've turned to more traditional blogs, always ones without advertising.  My favourite is Live Journal, http://www.livejournal.com, which I typically use for my own reflective writing (http://bgilgoff.livejournal.com).  Live Journal, like Elgg, allows for privacy control and also has excellent community building features, though perhaps not as academicaly focused, and not without advertising to buy into Live Journal's plus or paid accounts. More recently I've also started using blogspot, http://www.blogspot.com, in this case for a class newsletter,  and so have encouraged students to try it out as well. It too is easy to use and well worth exploring although a little confusing at first.   For students who need something a little simpler google has just recently taken over Writely, http://www.writely.com,  a wonderful on-line wordprocessor, also referred to as Google docs and spreadsheets.  It is also free and easy to use.  Students can log in, create a document and then add parents and teachers as collaborators on the document.  It is also possible to share documents or link documents from Writely to a Keep Tool Kit ePortfolio so that other can read them but not edit or alter them.   In fact, I've been so impressed with Writely that I have a few of my students work on Writely as a word processor for any in-school work so that I can have access from home or from school, with or without printing the document.  It is a great way to keep parents, resource teachers, or support workers involved and informed as well.  Even more importantly, the whole ePortfolio project, along with reflective writing, is a great way to get students thinking, writing, and thinking about their thinking.

In his article "Teachers' union fails test for accountability" in the Province on Tuesday, November 21, Michael Symth gets accountability wrong.  As a teacher I have no problem with being accountable to the students I teach, to their parents and to the school system including teachers in future grades, administrators and the Ministry of Education. However, I want to be accountable for the right things.  I want to be accountable for educating my students. I want to be accountable for encouraging students to think creatively, problem solve, think deeply, understand meaning, think critically, and learn information that is current and relevant to their individual learning needs.  I want to be accountable for helping to ensure that my students grow into caring, compassionate and responsible citizens.   I am happy to work with students and parents to collect authentic assessment which is immediate and relevant.

FSA tests are standardized tests which by their very nature, let alone the large scale on which they are administered, do not provide information about the real learning that children are doing.  At best they indicate the size and/or cost of the houses in the school catchment area.  When scores go up that probably signifies that we should be concerned about what real learning is being given up. But then again, when scores go up, it isn't even the scores of the same children but rather, the scores of a completely different group!  According to Dr. Alfie Kohn, at best an increase in test scores (such as FSA scores) signifies a regression to the mean or statistical noise.  A worst it is either evidence of "cheating" such as excluding the most vulnerable at risk children, (who definitely should be excluded from such testing!)  or teaching to the test.  Either way, if teachers are being held accountable through measures such as FSA tests and if that were to matter to teachers,  valuable learning time is then given up to focus on redundant, skill based learning rather than exploration, discovery, discussion, and more process based learning which is the core of real education. 

As a parent I applaud the teachers union for encouraging our teachers to not waste valuable teaching time putting labels on test booklets, supervising the hours of test writing,  and sorting forms.  Personally I would prefer that my children's teachers are in the classroom teaching.  As to the information being used to improve schooling I have, as yet, seen little evidence of that.  Scores from FSA tests typically are sent back to schools and parents up to six months after the FSA tests are administered.  To date the most consistent use I've seen is that which the Fraser Institute is quick to do, post the scores so that the schools are ranked.  I'm not quite sure how knowing which schools get the highest scores and which schools gets the lowest scores helps us at all, except perhaps to confirm that those with the highest scores are situated where house prices are also highest and visa versa.

On Reading Maurice Gibbon's article  Walkabout - Self Directed Learing I was immediately reminded of my student teaching experience in 1979 when we used that idea of a walkabout with a grade 7 student who was having some trouble with the regular grade 7 curriculum.  Today I don't actually remember the effect of the experience on the student, but I do know that the discussions around the philosophy had a profound effect on me.  To this day probably a large part of my struggle with curriculum and "meeting measurable learning outcomes" has to do with my own questions about how real and meaningful those outcomes are for students in preparing for life in our society today.

In the article Gibbons, argues that grade 12 graduation as our right of passage from grade 12 into the adult world leaves a lot to be desired. Typically students write theoretical, abstract and often meaningless exams which fall short of requiring them to demonstrate any real readiness to be taking care of themselves and making a responsible, worthwhile contribution to the society they are entering. Similarly the graduation celebration, with speeches and certificates, and students partying separately from their families, demonstrates little relation to what they will be moving on to.  What students are asked to do in preparation "should be experiential and the experience should be real not simulated."  It should "extend the student's capablities as far as possible", involving some risk taking, not something which is easily attainable or already mastered. It should culminate the students experience in some way, putting to use what he/she already knows in a novel way.  The student should have a say in what it will be. For our society it needs to involve decision making and should also involve a real confrontation with who the child is. It should be appropriate as a demonstration of readiness to move into the adult world. Graduation should bring significant people together to "solidify the spiritual community".

Gibbons then offers an alternative for transitioning students from adolescence into adulthood including a plan for demonstrating what they have mastered in five areas: Adventure, Creativity, Sevice, Pratical Skill, and Logical Inquiry.  Once the students complete their plan in all five areas, they share their experiences and expertise in each of the areas. The final demonstrations are shared by teachers, families and friends. 

As I read this article I couldn't help but consider that  the sort of  walkabout plan which Gibbons proposes has implications for portfolio assessment such as what the Ministry of Education is trying to bring in as a part of the Grade 12 process.  The problem though is that for it to work, or for the Portfolio process in general to work, in my opinion there needs to be more invested in it as a real and meaningful process.  It can't be tacked on, on top of exams. It can't be mandated and enforced for a small number of kids in the top academically because it is linked to the Passport to Education. But rather it needs to be  made more real and meaningful, as the real assessment, not something in addition to exams and school marks.  Even more importantly, it needs to matter to the adult world that the students are moving into.  For that, universities, colleges and other post-secondary institutions would need to be prepared to look at portfolio evidence, as would  business and the corporate world.