Deeply personal

When you're on holiday, I guess you must have come across people selling 'personalised' souvenirs. Name plates for doors, T-shirts, mugs, keyrings, even baseball caps - with every name under the sun on them (well almost - the only names I haven't seen on any personalised merchandising are 'Adolf' and 'Jezebel'. I'm not sure why...) Such merchandising is 'personalised' because one of those mugs - the one the shopkeeper hopes you're going to buy - has your name on it. But wait. It's not really personalised is it? You didn't make the mug. Someone made it for you - and then put your name on it. And then you buy it and use it. It becomes yours. But is it really that deeply personal?

I was reading Jim Campbell's article on personalisation of learning again today. I referred to it in my last post and promised I would revisit it. He explores Leadbeater's taxonomy of personalisation as it relates to public health care. Leadbeater's 5 levels of personalisation were: 1) providing more customer friendly services 2) giving people more say in how they use the services 3) giving users more say in how money is spent on the services 4) users become co-designers and co-producers of the services, and 5) self organisation of services by individuals, with support provided by professionals.

Ring any bells yet? For me this resonates clearly with the tension between the provision of Content Management Systems (what we commonly call institutional VLEs) and personal learning environments (PLEs). Campbell argues that the first 3 of Leadbeater's levels are shallow forms of personalisation, while the last two are deeper forms of personalisation. So let's apply this to personal learning environments by translating the 5 levels into an education context.

1) Providing learners with more student centred opportunities 2) giving learners more choice in what they learn, how and when and where they learn it 3) giving learners more say on how resources are used 4) learners design and produce their own content 5) learners self organise their own learning with the support of professionals.

It is clear to see that in an educational context, the same kind of personalisation of services could be applied as in public health care. Can we shift from the edubusiness making a product for the institution, and then branding it on their behalf, to the point where the learner can choose and construct the learning environment they want to use, and the personalise it for themselves? The problem is, learners are a little like patients in many ways - they are the consumers of the product, and transforming them into the co-producers of the service they will also consume requires that a) they view themselves as being capable of doing so b) the professionals who have so far provided the service actually trust them and c) there is an infrastructure in place to support the process. The third component is already in place - Web 2.0 tools are available for all learners to choose and use to support their own self organised learning. It's the first two that are the problem if we are ever to get to the point where learning becomes deeply personal for all.

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Deeply personal by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.