Personalisation and the mixed age merino moving along the race towards the drafting gate.

The Magnet and I had breakfast this morning with a high county farmer - our inspiration, our mentor, and our friend.  It has been too long since we last met –and we had much irreverent conversation, and unseemly adventure to share.  We laughed too loudly for “Eggs Benedict and a long black” on the left, gestured too extravagantly for “NZ Herald with Bagel and Bacon” on the right and talked too excessively (a word per minute count that could power the national grid) for “Flat White Trim and Fruit Crepes” behind.  But since we were all too aware of what life offers the merino who follows expectations in the race – we refused to be subdued by the expectations of the Remuera breakfast club.

The MoE suggests that e learning will enable some kind of radical personalisation that will in some ill defined way rescue the learner, but after breakfast with a high country farmer this morning I am thinking that the reality of the MoE personalisation “when doing school” is closer to the personalisation done to the mixed age merino trapped on the race rather than the personalisation indulged in by the merino when roaming the remote and rugged slopes of the mountain valleys. 

Placing the learner at the center of the education system (personalising) is as radical a notion as that conceived by the first Labour Government.  It’s about providing  a flexible system where teachers, schools, communities, and other groups can identify the needs of their learners and be provided with the tools and support to meet those needs within the broader curriculum. (Enabling the 21st Century Learner An e-Learning Action Plan for Schools 2006-2010).

Like some of the other stuff I've been learning lately, the trick in all of this "personalisation" stuff seems to be in figuring out who identifies the needs of the learner.

I’d like to suggest that the sense of “personalisation” described in the foreword of the eLearning Action Plan is like counting the teeth and checking the udder of the merino in the race stuff– in that the document describes personalisation as something that other people (schools, communities, and other groups) do with ICT to track and/or figure out the needs, patterns, preferences of the learner.

This is a controlling and limited view of placing the learner in the center and misrepresents the ways in which information and communication technologies are already being used by students outside of school to create personalised participatory media. 

It is our lack of institutional imagination rather than the kid of today that is the biggest barrier to making schools work as learning commons.

Today's students are not waiting for an e action plan or an imposed personalisation. 

They already personalise media for learning– They have almost limitless choice in what they access and learn –and they choose the time and place of their learning – They do not rely on a timetable to schedule when they learn, nor do they rely on one teacher to tell them the content available in period 1.  They experience on demand learning, with learning experiences of their choice, when they choose rather than the learning experiences of the teacher's choice broadcast between 9.15am and 10.15am. 

In school learning is tightly scheduled – if you miss period 3 at school on Friday well you’ve missed the opportunity to learn about acid base titration altogether, you can photocopy the notes from a mate but your chances of accessing the learning experience with the teacher before the next rotation are remote. Your ability to study across levels and to include unusual subject choices is similarly  determined by the scheduled timetable rather than your interest.   

Out of school kids don’t just sit in a classroom and absorb content – they interact with multimedia on the bus, under a tree, in their bedroom, at the beach, in the high country - kids create and co-create, manipulate, organise and social tag new learning (often on their own personalised web spaces), and they do this in ways that constructivist pedagogies can scarcely imagine. 

The kids are not waiting for teachers, schools, communities, and other groups to identify their needs (personalise their learning) – they are doing the personalisation themselves.  Much like those mixed age merino roaming the remote and rugged slopes of the mountain valleys.

Comments

[botts]

so, if we are prepared to accept that:

"Out of school kids don’t just sit in a classroom and absorb content – they interact with multimedia on the bus, under a tree, in their bedroom, at the beach, in the high country - kids create and co-create, manipulate, organise and social tag new learning (often on their own personalised web spaces), and they do this in ways that constructivist pedagogies can scarcely imagine."

Then my next step is to ask why we don't take the personalised learning they do into account? why, for instance, are we forcing kids to do basic powerpoint presentations when they already have the tools and skills necessary to create full blown multimedia presentations?

imagine a teacher prepping a class for an assignment on say "australian history". imagine that same teacher first asking if any of the kids in the class attended an anzac day parade and took photos with their mobile phone, or video(d) it and then cut it into something like the herd's magical rendition of redgum's classic "i was only 19". and imagine further the kid at the back putting up her hand and saying "yeah i did - what of it?" and now imagine the teacher smiling and saying, "well if you've got it posted on youtube tag it up with 'historyclassassignment' and stick it on delicious and i'll grab it later and that can be your submission."

OMG... i need a bex and a good lie down - all that imagining hurts.

[Doug Noon]

From the review on Amazon of I Wont Learn From You: The title essay explores the provocative idea that ''not-learning'' is a conscious choice made by children who observe, sometimes very early, that the school system is trying to impose on them values and behavior that are foreign and sometimes repugnant to them. Diagnosed as learning- disabled, stupid, or disciplinary problems, children who appear not to be able to learn to read or do math may simply have opted out of the system, choosing instead to put their intelligence and creativity to work outside school

Learning, comprehending on cue, according to plan, with an objective, seems a grand conceit on the part of teachers and anyone else who wants to engineer learning.

I never considered that there might even be such a thing as institutional imagination. What does that suggest? I have something new to wonder about today. Thanks.

[Jedd]

RE personalisation in elearning: - Yes, not only must we recognise that learners already personalise media for learning, but that this will only increase in ways we cant imagine, and we can't hold on to any notions of control.

Creating a "hip" personalised elearning space (for example) and expecting to contain the flock for any length of time is plainly woolly thinking. They'll head for the hills.

And there's not a lot of sense in taking a slice of what is apparently happening now (or last week/ last month/ last year) and then using that as a design brief for the next couple of years.

jedd

[Lynette]

"The kids are not waiting for teachers, schools, communities, and other groups to identify their needs (personalise their learning) – they are doing the personalisation themselves."

This is true and sadly is something that becomes a deficit when those teachers, who are unwilling to relinquish the control of their classrooms, do not allow students to incorporate their vastly connected worlds beyond the classroom into the learning prescribed within the classroom environemt.

How do we encourage teachers to release the reigns, or remove them all together? Especially those who have only just begun to tentatively move toward "allowing" students to use presentation packages (PowerPoints) to present their work. Teachers who do not feel comfortable or confident with using the tools are less likely to open their classrooms up to open slather. As such the personalised learning environment will only be personalised for individual students according to the parameters set by the teacher.

Amongst all this we need to remember, that whilst the great majority of our students are connecting with multimedia regularly, some of our students are unable or are not allowed access the online world beyond the opportunities they are provided with at school. Teachers need to ensure equity. In the same token by encouraging students to create their own personalised learning envrionments, online, and providing opportunities for this in the classroom may open up new opportunities for these few.

[cj]

What folk don't get is that the "teacher game", the MoE game is still largely about producing stuff, personalised stuff even. Producing stuff in a world awash with stuff strikes me as another dumb, in a richly patterned way (pace James Boyle), practice. It's like peeing in the ocean with a hope that your liquid will be significant or even noticed. It's acting as if the world is still in the 1980's or 90's (pick a decade, any decade). This little blog is a harbinger of the forms of knowledge work that pose more than an interesting challenge to the formal structures that used to have something of a monopoly on knowledge work. Sigh. Hang on to the credentialling folks, not a lot left other than that.

[SC]

On a slightly different tact: James Packer today sold half his media empire to overseas interests and doubled his personal wealth amidst cries of ‘ a dark day for democracy’. What was interesting was the ABC grilling of Federal Communications Minister (whatever her name is) justifying 15% foreign ownership laws changing to 50% overnight. Her rationale was this: ‘the media landscape we live in is changing very rapidly, there are so many more ways people get their information and entertainment, and listed a scary list of platforms: phones that play movies, sing songs, take photos, move money, send email, and a range of telecommunication, print media……blah, blah, blah……..it’s all changing. Really, it is. If we don’t loosen the laws we’ll be stuck with outdated media technology!
Then some weird connection happened. There’s so much media nobody absords hardly any of it. Yet it all generates advertising revenue to the tune of billions of dollars.
‘………..the trick in all of this "personalisation" stuff seems to be in figuring out who identifies the needs of the learner……’
I work in a school where kids pay $10 to use their internet time, and when there account is empty, they have to re-fill it to access the internet. Needless to say a third of the school cant access the internet ‘cos we’ve got no money. Yet, somehow most of these kids living in generational poverty have mobile phones. Some have two! The other day two yr7 girls came to see me (out of uniform ‘cos they cant afford it, wanting lunch pass ‘cos of no food, no interent time, etc….)but magically could transfer credit from ones phone to the other!
How the fuck do they do that! I struggle to unlock mine.
Yes it’s exciting, yes the potential is unexplored, but have we adequately explored the dark side?…. I suspect we’re too busy trying to keep up with the latest technology.

[DG]

This may be my somewhat "woolly" thinking, but this sheep analogy can be used to state where our education system is at present.

The farmers are kept busy all the time. Their sheep are in pens (in batches) and are moved out and into the pens up to five times a day. The farmer points out the grass (Often throwing it too them is easier in the hectic environment), each sheep is expected to be intimately know by the farmer - even their internalised attitudes and motivations. Frequently the wool on the sheep must be measured and described so that it can be reported on at any moment. Triplicate records must be kept and the sheep must be shorn twice a year to get them ready for the big shearing for the three to five year olds - which goes to the NCEA store. When the wool is processed at the NCEA store data comes back that tells everyone how good/bad the sheep, farmer and farm is. The farmer must also grow the grass, decide which grass is best (even make the grass - it seems now), whilst moving the fences and the many other jobs that are handed on to them.
Once in a while a farmer escapes for a year and gets to experience and see the higher pastures and grazing possibilities that exist outside of the pens. Only to return the next year and begin again to shovel manure. So where too from here?
Are little increments or pockets of difference enough?

[cj]

Really enjoying the input SC and DG. A quick thought about all the noise and paying attention. You may find a piece by Michael Goldhaber interesting - he has a notion of "an attention economy" and develops an argument about it. It is a bit old but still an interesting idea. I am not in enough command of farming metaphors to write about alternative ways of farming sheep but would if I could... feral sheep? Even feral sheep herders/minders. Or even more playfully, what if all the sheep actually had clippers? This is a mapping of an idea a guy who was talking about the shift with the new participatory web and used deer hunting as the analogy... only now, all the deer have guns!