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.
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