JohnsBlog

Personalising learning – allowing the learner to learn whatever, however and whenever they want to learn – has got to be a good thing, right? Well, maybe not. In his 2002 article MyUniversity.com? Cass Sunstein argues that too much personalisation could have consequences that are bad not only for learning, but also for a diverse, democratic society.

Sunstein’s argument is twofold. First, if students are set free to filter out the content they find unfamiliar or unsettling, focusing only on what they think in advance they want to learn, they will actually miss out on the richest learning opportunities. Those

unanticipated encounters involving topics and points of view that people have not sought out and perhaps find quite irritating, are central to education, democracy, and even to freedom itself.

Second, if every learner is free to construct their own personalised learning experience, a vital social dimension to the learning is lost. Knowledge risks becoming individualised and fragmented, with no common set of reference points for learners and educators to coalesce around. Sunstein believes that

Citizens, including members of educational institutions, should have a range of common experiences. Without shared experiences … people will find it increasingly hard to understand one another. (Sunstein, 2002)

I think Sunstein is about 75% right. It’s true that without a shared set of reference points, without those unexpected encounters, learning can barely happen at all. And he’s right to suggest that the current preoccupation with personalisation – the desire for everything to revolve around ‘me’ – is related to a more generalised consumer-individualism: the idea that we have the right to purchase whatever we want, from anywhere in the world, whatever the cost, in order to construct a unique persona for ourselves.

And yet, and yet…

There’s a more positive way of looking at personalisation in learning which Sunstein perhaps overlooks. Not as filtering out the unfamiliar, not as the fragmenting of collective experience, but simply as an increase in the individual learner’s control over the learning experience. Any cognitive or constructivist approach to education requires the learner to be an active partner in the process, and that in turn implies scope for decision-making and the expression of personal preference by the learner. If educators hope to produce independent learners, they must first give learners some independence.

And there’s a crucial aspect of online learning that Sunstein has not taken into account: community. Properly understood, eLearning is a networked activity, with dialogue between a community of learners (and teachers) at its heart: such a dialogue presupposes, and could not take place without, a common core of learning content and a shared set of learning experiences.

My current OU course exemplifies this. H806 consists of a core of texts, themes, modules and assignments which all students must engage with in order to complete the course; but at the same time gives students a great deal of choice about which learning objects to focus on, and enormous latitude in how they relate the new ideas to their personal experience, in what to read, and in how to express and record their learning. H806 also, and crucially, consists of a community of learners who continuously share their experience, their knowledge and their insights in various online communities – communities where students’ diverse professional and cultural backgrounds are a regular source of different views, new knowledge, challenged assumptions, and unanticipated encounters.

At its powerful best, eLearning can be both personal and communal.
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Sunstein C, 2002. MyUniversity.com? Personalized Education and Personalized News. EDUCAUSE Review Volume 37, Number 5, September/October 2002. Available online @ http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Review/MyUniversitycomPersonaliz/40359?time=1209199791