Conferences

Yesterday I attended the 7th annual eLearning @greenwich conference “Making IT Personal“, which focused on the practical and theoretical, technical and pedagogical issues surrounding the notion of “self-regulated learning”, summarised by the key notion of “personalisation”. How can optimal (pedagogically beneficial) personalisation be achieved using eLearning tools? I missed the first ten minutes of the keynote by Professor Jonathan Drori: “Personalisation – the good, the bad, and the ugly”. The first thing I learnt today was to remember never to underestimate Deptford traffic gridlock. Leaving the house at eight to arrive at ten for a journey that would have taken me only 30 minutes to cycle is one of those valuable offline lessons life insists on throwing at me. I bat them away.

The morning keynote set the tone very gently. Learning is (obviously) an experience, but unlike personal pleasurable ones to which we return on our own accord, learning experiences are often imposed; worse, they are generally ill defined, their relevance to the students left unclear. Asking the audience to shout out some pleasurable personal activities, Jonathan used the answers to illustrate key adjectives that explain why theses activities are engaging. (I was one of the few to participate and shouted “having a political discussion in the pub”, which earned me an “aw, how sweet!” and giggles from the audience. An outrage! ). Pleasurable, personal experiences can be characterised as being:

1. Defined

2. Fresh

3. Accessible

4. Immersive

5. Significant

6. Transformative.

This is an assertion by Jonathan, but judging by the tweets, many in the audience agreed that this was a useful list. Learning experiences however often don’t fit any of those adjectives, they can be imposed, badly designed, irrelevant, indifferently presented, repetitive. They are not personal, they lack the personable. (So far, so fairly obvious. The ideal of personalisation is old and almost intuitively right: better teachers are engaging, performing, personable and pay attention to each individual student. They are also rare – what can we do to improve the situation?)

Professor Drori maintained that “the harder the concept, the more personal the learning experience needs to be.” If you want learning to be effective, or indeed at the very least to “actually take place”, then the best teaching emulates what we now know good experiences to be about. Thus, any tool, particularly eLearning tools need to be chosen according to how much they support this ideal of personalisation. Finishing on ‘the good, bad and downright ugly use of technologies’, I was struck by his unquestioning allegiance to the common instrumental definition of technology; and he was not above using the dreaded comparison that technologies can be like, say a kitchen knife: it can be good (for chopping onions) and bad (for stabbing people) – in effect employing the tired “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” argument characteristic of the neutrality view of technology. But issues surrounding technology – including their use in an educational setting – are rarely this simple and need much more critical appreciation. I wasn’t too bowled over by the speech, and found a final almost fatalist note surprising. Commenting on the importance to engage our children from an early age (fair enough), he asserted that if you start a bad habit early enough, be it smoking, disrespect, or indeed a bad attitude towards learning, you will continue to practice this bad habit. Which, I would suggest, does not bode well for any idealist conception of adult education. I will listen to it again, to see if I missed some salient points. I have been told it will be available as a podcast soon.

After coffee I attended a very interesting presentation on eLearning & social inclusion by Alan Clarke, formerly of NIACE. Alan was enthusiastic and almost overwhelmingly positively charged: IT can do so much to support those whom he prefers to call disadvantaged, rather than excluded: prisoners and ex-offenders, adults with almost no formal education, teenage mothers, disabled students… people, aged from 16 to death who have often very poor basic skills, the lowest confidence in their own abitlies and a history of educational failure. Due to the very nature of the learners NIACE supports, the approach can but be personal: these learners have no common learning skills, if they have anything in common it is a deep-seated suspicion of the processes of formal learning. He told us a variety of positive stories to illustrate how elearning, and the adaptive use of technology in a variety of settings has had an enormous impact on bringing disadvantaged learners “back into the fold”, giving them back confidence.
My second chosen presentation, led by Mary Kiernan and Ray Stoneham, both of Greenwich University, considered the dichotomy between socialisation and personalisation: The Danger of Impersonalisation in Mass Personalised Learning: Can Socialisation and Personalisation Co-exist? As an ice-breaker we were asked to write down our names and answer the question “if you had to ask one question about personalisation what would it be and why.” Our neighbour was then to introduce us with that question. Becki, to my left asked why personalisation was such a difficult task to accomplish, and I had her read out “is personalisation only this year’s buzz word to be replaced by a cool new one next year”, which had started to crystallise even before we were asked to perform this little “socialisation task”. We’ll be sent a list of the other questions, most of which were pertinent.Their key thesis in a nutshell: we have a basic human need to socialise but tend no longer to do this on PLEs (VLEs). There may be personalisation, but no socialisation. The question is: what happens when we neglect the social integration? Lack of connection will lead to demotivated students. Of course personalisation is nothing new, denoting the effort to personalise learning for large cohorts of people, whilst aiming for the same goal but with different routes and different starting points. Plato’s Socratic dialogues often embody the principle, the Oxbridge model is another example, and special educational needs another. But within these models, socialisation is implicit. In PLEs, socialisation is often left out, or at most paid lip service to. Further, personalisation itself brings up a set of dichotomies: individuality versus mutuality, social learning versus isolated learning etc. The issue for elearning is therefore to prevent that social learning, community learning falls by the wayside. An interesting discussion followed on from here, with participants sharing their experiences, worries and ideas about how social software can be integrated into PLEs, and what potential hurdles must be overcome. (My thinking is that our focus needs to be on the teachers – they need to understand the use and abuse, the potential and dangers of social software to make informed choices about how to use them in their teaching. I don’t think the burden of choosing tools for learning delivery should lie with the students).

Lunch was edible and fresh fruit abounded, and stimulating chats with colleagues were had, so that was me happy.

After lunch I decided to do a little writing and thinking before I joined the herd again for the final keynote, by Serge Ravet. It was fast and furiously delivered in a heartening French accent, challenging conceptions about personalisation. It touched on a myriad of topics and ideas, flitted from worries about personal data management to social networks, from hosting to aggregating, the concept of the “Internet of Subjects”, individualisation, Jean-Claude Kaufman’s book The invention of the Self (available in French or German…). A key message of his was that not only is there much more to personalisation than many contemporary discussions (in education, for example) will have you believe – data management, regulation, ownership, creation, sharing – but also that it may be the wrong concept to focus on: Ravet emphasises the importance of individualisation, and instead of personalised learning, which he considers old, trite, adaptive, he favours self-regulated learning, which is both individuation and individualisation, and thus a type of identity construction. I liked his challenge to the idea that we all speak of having different identities, an online identity, an offline identity. I do think this is a dangerous metaphor to perpetuate, as it gives rise to the idea that we are becoming fractured, split personalities, schizophrenics, or superheroes (Bruce Wayne/Batman) – and that the source for this clinical “wrong” is our being tied to technology. Our identity may be fragmented, but it is not therefore broken.

He was quick, and touched on various ideas I will have to follow up in the near future. Hopefully there will be a podcast of his talk too.

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