It seems hard to believe I’ve known Dr. David Wiley for years now. I just got to visit with him again last week in Orlando. He’s one of the people who really convinced me to give this blogging thing a try. He has a new post up this morning about differentiating instruction:
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.
Lying about Personalized Learning at iterating toward openness.
There’s a lot of food for thought in that post, but for me, the interesting idea in this post is that “champions of personalized instruction” are forced to using “an automated computer system” as the “best and most effective path forward.”
As a disclaimer, I don’t run in the same circles of technovation that David does. He probably sees more of this than I do. Or maybe pays more attention.
In truth, I’m not really interested in personalized instruction as much as I am in personalized learning. My goals are not to make my lessons different for everybody but to teach them how to learn what they need in any circumstance. As a result, my approach to “personalizing instruction” has more to do with helping students find the people to talk with who will be most instrumental in helping them learn.
Personal learning environments aren’t just about what tools you plug into them, but who you point them at as well. It’s all well and good to blog and aggregate, but if you only write to your classmates (or the teacher) and only aggregate the echo chamber, then you’re not going to learn much. Which, if I read it correctly, is what David’s saying.
If what we’re doing to “personalize learning” is making a computer talk differently to a person, then we’re missing the boat. “[U]sing an automated computer system as our best and most effective path forward” … ? Um. Not so much.
November 13th, 2008 at 1:50 am
Students need to know where to go to find the information they need. You would not want to teach a student to use a dictionary as their only means of information. What happens when a student needs to look at a map? They only understand how to look up the word map not to go look for an atlas where they can view maps. Students often get this look in the classroom when given a task. Where do I go find it? Technology is the same way, students as well as teachers need to know what tools or resource is the best for that task at hand.
To the subject of Dr. Wiley’s blog post. He is mostly right that teachers often ushers students into one learning environment. However, the reason is not for efficiency. Efficiency coveys doing something the quickest and most effective way possible. While it may be quick to have everyone doing the same thing in the same manner day in and day out, this is anything but effective, thereby not efficient. It is easier for the schools and teachers to have a uniform system but the problem is that they do not have a uniform population of learners. Trying to wrangle everyone into a small circle of learning is not only inefficient but downright selfish in that the benefits is to the few (instructors) rather than to the many (students).
November 16th, 2008 at 12:26 am
I think that personalized learning is better and more feasible than personalized instruction. I like to give my students an assignment and let them choose how to complete it. Some may choose to write about it, others will draw, make a model, use manipulatives, etc. They decide for themselves how to learn about the information. It is impossible for teachers to determine what is best for all students. We can present them with information, but we cannot make them learn it. They have to do that for themselves. If everyone has to do assignments and projects the same way then more than likely the information will not always apply to them in the best manner. I think that freedom on choice is one of the most important learning tools.
November 22nd, 2008 at 10:10 am
I do think that kids and adults learn differently but it is not necessarily “how they are wired” as much as it is what the adults have been en-grained with. The adults are too busy to take time to “play” with something new and try to figure it out which is exactly what they would have done as a child. They spend they vast majority of the day trudging through their “responsibilities”, whether it be work, kids, household chore, etc. that they don’t have time for much of anything else. They are intrigued by things that will make their life easier but if it is not a quick learn then they don’t have time to devote to it.
I also think they are also going into it with a preconceived notion that it is hard to learn. That is something that I had to work with in my chemistry classes. I began each year with a student information survey to learn a little bit about my students and part of the survey asked them about their opinions of Chemistry. Every year, the majority of students said it is hard but the class is required so I have to take it. We had to work for the next several weeks trying to overcome this attitude and I think adults are looking at technology, especially, with the same attitude. Just like my students, they don’t know a great deal about it but they already have the mind set that it is going to be difficult.