Food For Thought: Personalised Learning

From my Twitter feeds this morning I followed a link "challenging Assumptions," to a site colleague Linda Hartley had recently read, and as a result was directed to this thought provoking animation about personalised learning, provided by personalised learning now. Thanks Linda, I am flagging the site and animation here as a space to return to, and the animation as something to share with colleagues, when we think about the potential affordances of learning platforms. I feel we need to find a frame for showing that although these tools may mean additional work in learning how to use them, in the long term they require us to look beyond the technology, and not to see them as teaching and delivery devices that we fit into our current models of practice, but as resources and spaces that can enable and facilitate means of looking at teaching and learning differently. With a new set of technologies, perhaps we can find space to begin to reflect upon and explore new views of the "classroom."

I like the context for the animation, which embeds the historical context of current schooling within the Forster Act, the view continues through out the animation showing how schools and schooling, but particularly how cultural views of the learner and learning seem to have have changed little, despite changes and technological developments since that time. The confused Martian from a world where distributed knowledge, networked learning, conversation and shared meaning making are recognised and day to day features of personalised education, provides a powerful image of the differences between personalised catologued curricular, and the one hat fits all delivered curriculum paradigm we are currently so fond of. I apologise in advance if my interpretations and this summary oversimplify the presentation, check it out. I guess what excited and stimulated me most was how what is presented herebegan to help me link ideas that emerged during recent inspirational presentations given by Professor Stephen Heppell and Lord Puttenham. Thanks again Linda.