个性化学习的谎言---ying about Personalized Learning

Lying about Personalized Learning

http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/655

Champions of personalized instruction tend to fall back on the assumption that one-on-one tutoring is the most effective instructional approach but is not scalable (implicit in Bloom’s two sigma problem), and since “we all know” that group instruction is poor, we’ve no choice but to personalize using an automated computer system as our best and most effective path forward.

Now, if you’ve ever taught, you know that many students love to talk. It seems that they live to ask questions, argue, and endlessly discuss. Now, I ask you: How can removing all possibility of engaging in their favorite approach to learning (by making the computer the only entity with whom they can interact) be said to be personalization for them?

(And let’s not forget my pet hypothesis regarding the increasing importance of social interaction as one moves further up Bloom’s taxonomy. When students are working near the top of the taxonomy, the absence of social interaction will greatly decrease the efficiency of all learners.)

Systems that want to make claims to “personalize” must include multiple options for students who prefer interacting with other humans. A “full palette” of personalization options that involve variations of interactions with a single entity (the computer) is basically a monochrome palette. “Personalize your new car with any color you want! You can get it in blue, light blue, midnight blue, sky blue, Carolina blue, azurite, ultramarine, cerulean blue, cobalt blue, even Prussian blue!” (Reminiscent of the great SNL skit, “He could be green, or lime green, or mint green…”)

If we’re going to talk about “personalization,” options rich with human interaction must be part of the palette. Otherwise, we should call it what it is - a power grab by administrators forcing learners into a learning environment they do not prefer for the sake of increased efficiency.

5 Responses to “Lying about Personalized Learning”

1. Daniel LemireNovember 11, 2008 at 7:55 am

   In my courses, I am effectively forcing students to communicate in writing. I will answer as many questions as they can throw at me, but they need to be

   1) well written
   2) detailed and coherent
   3) on topic

   Turns out that few students can or will produce a lot of those. They are all for writing lots of vague questions, but once you ask them to be precise or to refer to specific arguments or facts, they complain that it is hard.

   And once I do get the questions, very often, the answer is just a URI. They get very annoyed to get back as an answer: “I have answered this question in the notes, just see the second paragraph there”.

   In the end, you see that no so many students like to chat a lot in writing. Very, very, very few. I can “out chat” then any day. After all, I blog to them, they never blog back.

2. Jared SteinNovember 11, 2008 at 9:13 am

   I like those observations, and the hint of cynicism. I definitely think the “personal” in “personalized learning” is shifting toward the social, as being social is what we do as persons (e.g. the necessity of network(s) in “personal learning environments”).

   Does the “personalized” of one-on-one and the “personal” of the social have to be mutually exclusive? I presume to say, not at all; we must be balanced.

3. Jon MottNovember 11, 2008 at 9:34 am

   Insightful observations Dave. As I was reading, I kept thinking of the phrase “it’s nothing personal” and the common reply “isn’t everything personal?”

   What do we really mean by “personalized” learning? While the more common usage of the term implies learning that is tailored, adapted and customized to individual, i.e. personal, preferences, another equally viable meaning of personalized learning is learning that is more connected with other persons, i.e. interactive, full of the discussion, questions, and give-and-take you suggest.

   So-called computer adaptive, “personalized” learning is really the opposite–learning that has been stripped of all human interaction. I’d call that *depersonalized* learning.

4. Stephen DownesNovember 11, 2008 at 11:19 am

   OK, I think we can all agree that having a student interact with nothing but a computer program - no matter how personalized - is a poor substitute for a proper program of learning.

   This is not to say that such interactions cannot be employed very productively for spot duty - for example, students can learn to program a computer using an interactive module, create Flash animations through a series of computer demonstrations, or practice learning a language in a self-teaching manual.

   Learning, though, when viewed more widely, typically involves some sort of interaction with others. This is not because ‘humans are inherently social’ or any such thesis about human nature but because what they are learning is composed to a large degree of social constructs - vocabularies, ways of living, ways of practice, and the rest.

   So we want to include a dimension of social interaction in our online learning. We want students to engage with communities composed of practitioners, learners, instructors and mentors. And we want to organize these interactions in a way that best suits individual learners. ‘Personalized learning’ in this context means not merely personalized content but personalized interactions.

   But we need to cash out what that means. As Daniel Lemire points out, while students can be a font of communications activities, not all of it will be useful or manageable for other people in the network. His experience is my experience - given carte blanche we can expect the full range from serious, detailed enquiries to long strings of questions semantically equivalent to a child asking “why… why… why?” The purpose of such questions can also range variously from genuine attempts to learn to facile attempts to annoy and irritate.

   Thus, because we want to respect the need of others in the course - other students, instructors, mentors, and the like - to manage their own time and their own interactions, it follows that personalized interaction is not simply interaction tailored to the needs of an individual learner. It must be the result of a negotiation of process rather than a one-way catering to an individual learner’s needs and wants.

   It is in this negotiation that the creation of the social environment of learning is created. It is in this negotiation that social learning consists. There is no ‘zone of proximal development’ of other such fictitious ‘common’ ground in which learner and mentor share some space - there is rather a series of trials and errors on the part of each in an attempt to negotiate an interaction, a mechanism for communication, a transaction, an engagement.

   ‘Personalized learning’ is therefore the creation of a mechanism in which this negotiation for engagement can take place. It is the creation of engagement opportunities - as Nancy White said this week, of ‘invitations’, of communication ports and protocols, of learning mechanisms on the part of both student and mentor. Much of this negotiation process is automated (as is, for example, our communications networks of telephones or email or RSS feeds) but the actual communication results in the end only from one human sending messages to another.

   This does not man each instructor engages in a complete process of negotiation with each student. This mechanism - the supposed paragon of ‘personal instruction’ is neither expected nor desired. Not expected, because such a mechanism would require an immense resource of instructors, which society cannot sustain. Not desired, because the range of interactive possibilities would be limited to those that only two people could provide, and therefore insufficiently diverse to foster complexity of thought and understanding.

   Engagement with a mentor or instructor, in such an environment, is typically the result of a larger set of interactions, a series of negotiations that occurs with members of a community as a whole, of negotiations with other learners (often resulting in a ’student subculture’ within the community), with some more advanced learners, with practitioners, and with mentors and leaders of the community.

   Any given negotiation build on the many negotiations that preceeded it - just as any given conversation in a language (English, say) builds on each participants’ previous learning and practice in that language. That does not mean that no further negotiation is necessary - typically, understandings of language vary widely - but it does reduce to a significant degree the negotiation required in a particular case.

   So how do we understand ‘personalized learning’ in this context? It is the establishment of a mechanism (which may or may not be a technical mechanism - it could even be nothing more than a bunch of people standing in a field) whereby each individual can participate in the creation of engagement with others, where such engagements are directly negotiated by the participants to meet their own individual needs or interests.

5. Steven EganNovember 11, 2008 at 1:17 pm

   People are better equipped and able to personalize than a computer. Computers don’t understand meaning, just programmed patterns. Artificial Intelligence isn’t up to the challenge that a normal teacher faces. However, it can handle things like helping a user identify procedural mistakes for standardized problems. Yet that still boils down to what Stephen Downes said. “Much of this negotiation process is automated (as is, for example, our communications networks of telephones or email or RSS feeds) but the actual communication results in the end only from one human sending messages to another.”

   Then there is the question Jon Mott brought up, and his answer, “What do we really mean by “personalized” learning? While the more common usage of the term implies learning that is tailored, adapted and customized to individual, i.e. personal, preferences, another equally viable meaning of personalized learning is learning that is more connected with other persons, i.e. interactive, full of the discussion, questions, and give-and-take you suggest.”

   Considering what has been said here, both definitions of “personalized” are the same. The interaction and adaptation are the same. The program, the environment, is merely a tool for people to interact in ways not normally possible. This is, in theory, why the personalized learning environment is/was thought to be the silver bullet to making one-on-one interactions scalable. Unfortunately the part that is commonly forgotten is just what Scott mentioned, discussion and engagement. Computers and artificial intelligence can only do so much in this, while humans are able to do much more. That’s why the social media is being pushed as a solution. It is an environment, tools, for humans to use to interact, rather than to replace that interaction.