You can't walk where I walk

Someone once told me that life is like a fast moving stream. You can put your foot into it, and even let it flow over you for a while, but you can never put your foot into the same river twice. That's quite profound, but there is something even more profound. It is this: You can't walk where I walk. In other words, you can't experience what I experience. We may be sat watching the same movie or TV programme. We may read the same book, participate in the same conversation, or sit in the same lecture. But your experience will be different to my experience. We may come away with similar messages or impressions of what we have observed or experienced, but because we are unique individuals, we are by nature different to each other, and our perceptions will also be different. That is one very important reason why in schools, standardised testing, homogenised curricula and batch processing by age need to be changed for more personalised approaches to education.

It's all down to individual perception - what psychologists call the 'representation of reality'. My reality is slightly different to yours and yours from mine. It has little to do with you and I viewing the same thing from slightly different angles, although sometimes that can be a factor in creating different perceptions. No, it's not about different angles, it's about different perspectives. A number of variables cause each of us to view life uniquely, and to represent reality from different perspectives, including our age, gender, culture, background, health, preferences, personal beliefs, in fact just about everything that wire our brains uniquely, and make us individuals. When teachers attempt to differentiate learning, they generally focus on aptitude and ability or in some cases, whether a student has a disability. Some teachers are sidetracked into considering 'learning styles' but that is a big mistake, as I have previously discussed. Carl Rogers advocated 'unconditional positive regard', a philosophy that plays out when every student is considered to be of equal worth in the classroom, regardless of their previous 'form'.

What teachers should be focused upon is the whole child, and how they perceive life and represent reality differently to everyone else in the room. Differentiation should encourage diversity not simply make provision for it. It should celebrate the fact that we are all different, and include every single voice in the classroom, giving each an equal weight. That's hard to achieve, but with some fore thought and practice, and a great deal of patience, teachers can encourage each student to participate fully and play to their individual strengths. We are not that different from each other really. We all have the same needs, to be respected, to feel we belong to the group and to have a voice. Each of us is the same, but in uniquely different ways. If you can understand that, then you will understand why you can't walk where I walk.

Photo by Steve Wheeler


You can't walk where I walk by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Learner analytics

As was identified in the 2011 NMC Horizon Report ( I served on the advisory board of the UK JISC version), it seems that learner analytics is going to be a big thing for education over the next four to five years. Expect to see it emerging into mainstream practice in a number of versions, specifically aligned to the personalised learning agenda. From the report comes an explanation of learner analytics:

Learner analytics loosely joins a variety of data gathering tools and analytic techniques to study student engagement, performance, and progress in practice, with the goal of what is learned to revise curricula, assessment and teaching in real time. Building on the kinds of information generated by Google Analytics and other similar tools, learner analytics aims to mobilize the power of data-mining tools in the service of learning, and embracing the complexity, diversity and abundance of information that dynamic learning environments can generate.

Below is a very useful infographic developed by the Australian Open Colleges organisation. I think it explains just about everything you will need to know about learning analytics:

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Learner analytics by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

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.

Personalised learning

I have been thinking a lot about personalised learning lately. Last night, during a panel discussion for the Plymouth Education Society, I made a statement that the current UK National Curriculum doesn't make a lot of room for personalised learning. I quoted Ken Robinson who has claimed that the current model of school is based on an industrialised or 'factory' model, where children are 'processed in batches' according to their year groups. This model patently doesn't work, because it fails to take into account the variations in performance and ability within year groups. What happens next is that schools try to redress this imbalance by streaming kids - placing them into sets so that the 'brighter ones' get the chance to shine, while the 'less bright ones' are not left behind. That's all very well for the school management, but it can also be very devisive, and stigmatises some children. It may also be premised on faulty assessment methods.

Standardised assessment militates against personalised learning too. Many schools practice assessment of learning using a criterion referenced assessment. While this is an improvement over norm referenced assessment, it still fails students. What schools should be doing is assessing for learning - providing students with personalised feedback on their performance referenced against their own previous personal attainment - what we refer to as ipsative assessment. Thankfully some schools are now adopting this approach through for example, APP - Assessing Pupil Progress, or PLP - Personal Learning Plans. But it's not happening quickly or widely enough.

Today I sat in a seminar led by Professor Jim Campbell, of the University of Warwick. Jim had given us a paper he had published in 2007 to read and critique. It was entitled: Personalised Learning: Ambiguities in Theory and Practice. Reading the paper made me think hard about what we actually mean by personalised learning. In the paper Campbell et al draw upon Leadbeater's model of surface and deep personalisation, where the student steadily progresses from consumer to producer behaviour. There is a great deal of cross over here with personal learning environments (PLEs) of course, particularly in relation to user generated content and sharing within a community of practice. This is an area I intend to explore in more detail in future blog posts.

Reference

Campbell, R. J. et al (2007) Personalised Learning: Ambiguities in Theory and Practice. British Journal of Educational Studies, 55 (2), 135-154.

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