Another dot in the blogosphere?

Posts Tagged ‘continuum

As well intentioned as this tweet is, its brevity does not allow for caveats or elaborations.

When wisdoms are distilled into 140, or now, 280 characters, they hide the thought processes that generate them. They also create potential misconceptions. I address just two of the latter.

While it is true that the issue is not consumption vs creation, far too many learners still spend far too much time at the consumption end of the continuum.

This creates more problems in teaching, e.g., teachers trying to engage their students by getting them to consume what they present instead of empowering students to create.

Emphasising curation is not wrong, but this is nowhere near as important as content creation. Curation is mostly collating the work of other; creation is making your own.

If no one creates, what is there to curate? We should not just depend on the goodwill and effort of others. We should make and share openly and responsibly.

One of the best reads of 2017 so far is this blog entry simply titled Evaluating Personalization.

Personalised learning is a continuum between non-learner-provided choices and learner-directed agency.

I distill the long read to this takeaway: Personalised learning is a continuum between non-learner-provided choices and learner-directed agency. The non-learner could be the teacher, vendor, or edtech platform.

Or, in the words of the author:

…one end of the continuum is personalization for the learner; the other end is personalization by the learner

Instead of trying to outline the main points of the article, I will try to add value to it by making an observation.

In the era before current technologies like computers and phones, the focus was on providing choice. Today, edtech vendors still tout choice: pacing, content, modes, etc. The personalisation by agency — goals, expectations, strategies, evaluation — is still sorely lacking.

We cannot keep making the excuse that learners do not know what they want. If we teach them to wait to be fed, they will be lazy consumers. If we nurture them to think, they will not just critically consume, they will also skilfully catch and create.

There is another major problem with personalisation-as-choice. The options a vendor or designer provides might not actually be choices. I use an example I have cited before.

StarHub app

My current telco, StarHub, has an app that claims to provide “choices” for some cards that you can display or hide. However, if you deselect them, the app reverts to the selected state upon restart. So you cannot remove the content that is not relevant to you from the app.

While the example is from a commercial entity, edtech vendors and designers of curricula often do the same thing — they provide choices in theory that are not actually choices in practice. So even the provision of choice is not necessarily indicative of personalisation.

Learners need not wait for vendors, designers, or teachers to give them choices. With current open and/or collaborative tools like Google Apps and YouTube, learners can take matters into their own hands and find or make their own choices. In doing so, they move from one end of the spectrum to the other by creating their own agency.

A tweeted question to #edsg prompted this reflection.







But back to the question.








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