personalized/customized learning

Personalizing learning – the important role of technology — from OpenEducation.net by Thomas

On 04/07/2010, in higher education, K-12 related, pedagogy, personalized/customized learning, by Daniel Christian

Personalizing learning – the important role of technology — from OpenEducation.net by Thomas

New Viewpoint – Personalizing Learning
Clearly, that mindset has changed. With learning styles now a part of the educational landscape today’s teacher is expected to adjust to the varied preferences of students so as to maximize the learning potential of each individual in the classroom.

Such an approach has been characterized by the global term: personalizing the learning experience. The concept is considered as critical to the next generation of teachers as it is for the next generation of students.

Personalizing learning involves differentiating the curricula, including expectations and timelines, and utilizing various instructional approaches so as to best meet the needs of each individual. Essentially, students should be able to do varying assignments and have the freedom to work at a pace that is conducive to their abilities and skill set.

(Inserted comment here from DSC — Can you imagine how a teacher or professor is supposed to do/manage this for 20-25+ students without the use of technology — and with that number of students in the classroom about to go up substantially?)

Not too surprisingly, individual elements of a personalized learning environment are well known to current educators. The challenge is not so much what those elements consist of but how to piece the elements together to form a cohesive strategy.

Most importantly, personalizing learning for the current generation of learners demands specific technologies. Educators need to understand that children are growing up in a media-rich environment.

Schools must deliver a product that engages students and generates within them the desire to learn. Today’s curricula must involve liberal uses of technology whenever it is relevant to the task at hand.

But technology also plays a more important role in the personalization process. Ultimately it is the conduit for teachers to move to a learning approach that features materials developed for each individual student.

Relevant graphic below from DSC:

Tagged with: 1:1 • personalized learning

Is ‘The School of One’ the future of schooling? — dangerouslyirrelevant.org

On 04/01/2010, in learning preferences, personalized/customized learning, by Daniel Christian

Is ‘The School of One’ the future of schooling? — from dangerouslyirrelevant.org

Tagged with: customized learning

Digital access, collaboration a must for students — from eSchoolNews.com by Laura Devaney

On 03/16/2010, in digital learning, education technology, engagement / engaging students, game-changing environment, K-12 related, personalized/customized learning, social learning / networks, technologies for your home, by Daniel Christian

Digital access, collaboration a must for students — from eSchoolNews.com by Laura Devaney
Students increasingly are taking education into their own hands with personal technology experiences, a trend with important implications for schools

In a national survey that reveals K-12 students’ use of technology at home and at school, students overwhelmingly agreed that access to digital media tools and the ability to collaborate with peers both inside and outside of school can greatly enhance education.

“Speak Up 2009: Creating Our Future: Students Speak Up about their Vision for 21st Century Schools,” the latest education technology survey from the nonprofit group Project Tomorrow, identifies the emergence of “free agent learners”—students who increasingly take learning into their own hands and use technology to create personalized learning experiences.

“For these students, the schoolhouse, the teacher, and the textbook no longer have an exclusive monopoly on knowledge, content, or even the education process, and therefore it should not be surprising that students are leveraging a wide range of learning resources, tools, applications, outside experts, and each other to create a personalized learning experience that may or may not include what is happening in the classroom,” the report says.

…

The three elements identified in the report are:

Social-based learning: Students want to leverage emerging communications and collaboration tools to create and personalize networks of experts to inform their education experience.

Untethered learning: Students envision technology-enabled learning experiences that transcend the classroom walls and are not limited by resource constraints, traditional funding streams, geography, community assets, or even teacher knowledge or skills.

Digitally-rich learning: Students see the use of relevancy-based digital tools, content, and resources as a key to driving learning productivity, and not just about engaging students in learning.

Tagged with: digital learning • educational technology • game-changing environment • K-12 • Keeping students engaged • personalized learning • social learning

Some information/items on personalized learning — from theAplus.org

On 03/08/2010, in K-12 related, personalized/customized learning, by Daniel Christian

What Is Personalized Learning? –– from theAplus.org

Personalized Learning is a unique, blended classroom-based and nonclassroom-based public educational model that is tailored to the needs and interests of each individual student. Personalized Learning is a 21st century, “on the leading edge” approach to public education that honors and recognizes the unique gifts, skills, passions, and attributes of each child. Personalized Learning is dedicated to developing individualized learning programs for each child whose intent is to engage each child in the learning process in the most productive and meaningful way to optimize each child’s learning potential and success.

The key attributes that comprise the Personalized Learning model are based upon a solid foundation of the latest educational research findings as to how students learn most successfully, including a strong emphasis on parental involvement, smaller class sizes, more one-on-one teacher and student interaction, attention to differences in learning styles, student-driven participation in developing the learning process, technology access, varied learning environments, teacher and parent development programs, and choices in curriculum programs. No other educational model offered in today’s public education system has integrated these proven educational research results in such an in-depth and comprehensive manner to serve the diverse needs of today’s public education students.

From DSC:
Looking at the above chart, I’m reminded of the need for each of us to develop our own learning ecosystem, as there are so many choices/approaches/tools/methods out there; however there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. There is no silver bullet for everyone to achieve their optimal amount of learning.

Tagged with: customized learning • personalized learning

Sonic Pics

On 03/03/2010, in digital audio, digital learning, digital storytelling, digital video, mobile learning, mobile technologies, multimedia, personalized/customized learning, virtual field trips, by Daniel Christian

Features:

Intuitive user interface.
Automatically synchronizes your images to your audio recording.
Make .m4v movies of your images and narrations from your iPhone or iPod Touch.
Record up to 60 minutes per session!
Choose from good, better or best quality levels for audio.
Easy image selection and editing.
Give images unique names and descriptions that can optionally be shown during recording.
Image names become chapter markers in exported recordings.
Pause while recording.
Build slide shows with photos from photo albums, camera roll or built in camera.
Quickly jump to any image during a recording using the pop-up image chooser.
Recordings processed right on your phone, no 3rd party service required!
Transfer movies to your computer via WiFi web sharing (requires WiFi connection).
Upload movies to YouTube.
Chose to make your YouTube movies private.
Share your movie’s YouTube link via email.

Sample uses

Class field trip
New baby
Lecture recording
Creating mini-presentations on the road
Out with friends
Travel Logs
Conference notes
Honeymoon
Museum tours
Create Audio books
Lab notes
Insurance claims
Accident documentation
Medical diagnosis / dictation
Land surveys
Real estate tours
Home shopping
New town experiences
Staff introductions
Photo tours
Language instruction
Helping boyfriend study names/faces before meeting girlfriend’s family.

Original resource from:
Creating Digital Storybooks on the Fly with Sonic Pics — Living in the 4th Screen

Tagged with: digital audio • digital storytelling • digital video • Mobile learning • mobile technology

The New News Landscape: Rise of the Internet — from PewResearch.org

On 03/01/2010, in game-changing environment, journalism, mobile learning, new business models, participation, personalized/customized learning, by Daniel Christian

In this new multi-platform media environment, people’s relationship to news is becoming portable, personalized and participatory. These new metrics stand out:

Portable: 33% of cell phone owners now access news on their cell phones.
Personalized: 28% of internet users have customized their home page to include news from sources and on topics that particularly interest them.
Participatory: 37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.

From DSC:
Sounds an awful lot like where education is heading…portable, personalized, and participatory.

Tagged with: journalism • participation

Tagged with: computer science • multimedia • training

The International Journal of Multimedia & Its Applications (IJMA) is a quarterly open access journal that publishes articles which contribute new results in all areas of the Multimedia & its applications. The journal focuses on all technical and practical aspects of Multimedia and its applications. The goal of this journal is to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to focus on understanding recent developments this arena, and establishing new collaborations in these areas.

Authors are solicited to contribute to the journal by submitting articles that illustrate research results, projects, surveying works and industrial experiences that describe significant advances in the areas of Multimedia & its applications. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following

Audio, image, video processing
Digital Multimedia Broadcasting
Education and Training
Multimedia analysis and Internet
Multimedia and Artificial Intelligence
Multimedia Applications
Multimedia Communication and Networking
Multimedia Content Understanding
Multimedia Databases and File Systems
Multimedia human-machine interface and interaction
Multimedia Interface and Interaction
Multimedia security and content protection
Multimedia Signal Processing
Multimedia standards and related issues
Multimedia Systems and Devices
Operating system mechanisms for multimedia
Virtual reality and 3-D imaging
Wireless, Mobile Computing and Multimedia

Tagged with: AI • digital audio • digital video • internet • multimedia

Tagged with: engineering • K-12 • personalized learning • technologies

Quote from “Opinion: Internet and Education — Back to the Future”

On 02/16/2010, in future, future of higher education, personalized/customized learning, by Daniel Christian

Quote from “Opinion: Internet and Education — Back to the Future“ — from Vikram Savkar, SVP and Education Markets Director for Nature Publishing Group, a leading global science publisher:

That’s the promise of the Internet, which excels above all else at scale: scale of information, social interactions, geographic reach. But while there is seemingly nothing in education that isn’t migrating online — bookstores, labs, classrooms, field trips — not all of the Internet-driven attempts at innovation have equal merit. The acid test I apply to every new initiative is: to what extent does it bring us closer to the old system of individualized, personal, expert instruction, except with scale? (emphasis DSC)

Tagged with: 1:1 • future of higher education • personalized learning

Learning Styles and Tuition Dollars — Joshua Kim

On 02/12/2010, in business side of he, colleges, dangers of the status quo, higher education, instructional design, learning ecosystem, passions, personalized/customized learning, traditional / tradition, universities, by Daniel Christian

Learning Styles and Tuition Dollars — from Joshua Kim; Joshua is quoted below:

Colleges and universities that invest in creating personalized learning opportunities (emphasis DSC) will gain significant advantages in the competitive market for students.

Some attributes that we will look for in selecting a college:

– A philosophy to play to the strengths of its learners as opposed to correcting their weaknesses.

– The delivery of course and learning materials in formats (and on platforms) that are flexible enough to match a range of learning styles.

– An emphasis on supporting learners in finding their passions and in transitioning to creators and leaders.

Some things that we will not consider in choosing where our tuition dollars go:

– The U.S. News & World Report rankings. Rankings are for the median student, not my student. Your school needs to be the best for my student, not for all students.

– The dorms, the grounds, the gym, etc. etc. We expect these amenities. They are not differentiators.

– The number of books in the library. Books are not scarce, and my kid can only read one at a time.

Tagged with: budgetary • instructional design • Keeping students engaged • learning ecosystem • learning preferences • passions • student expectations • student-related

From DSC:
The following article got me to thinking of the future again…

Thousands to lose jobs as universities prepare to cope with cuts — from guardian.co.uk (original posting from Stephen Downes)
Post-graduates to replace professors | Staff poised to strike over proposals of cuts

I post this here because I believe that we are at the embryonic stages of some massive changes that will take place within the world of higher education. The timeframe for these changes, as always, is a bit uncertain. However, I would expect to see some of the following changes to occur (or continue to occur) yet this year:

Cost cutting
The cutting of programs
Laying off of staff and faculty
Not filling open positions
More outsourcing
The move towards using more cloud-based-computing models
The movement of students to lower-cost alternatives
Greater utilization of informal learning
The rise of online-exchange oriented offerings (i.e. the matching up of those who teach a subject and those who want to learn that subject)
The threat to traditional ways of doing things and to traditional organizations — including accreditation agencies — will cause people within those agencies to be open to thinking differently (though this one will take longer to materialize)
The continued growth of online learning — albeit at a greatly-reduced price
…and more.

This isn’t just about a recession. The Internet is changing the game on yet another industry — this time, it’s affecting those of us in the world of higher education. When the recession’s over, we won’t be going back to the way higher education was set up previous to the year 2010.

What did those us of in higher education learn from what happened to the music industry? What did we learn from what happened to the video distribution/entertainment business? To the journalism industry? To the brokerage business? To the travel and hospitality industries? To the bookstores of the world?

Along these lines…back at the end of 2008, I posted a vision entitled, The Forthcoming Walmart of Education. So, where are we on that vision? Well…so far we have:

Straighterline.com
A significant open courseware movement, including MIT Open Courseware, the Open Courseware Consortium, Connexions, Open Content Alliance, OpenLearn, Intute, Globe, Open Yale Courses, Open Education, The Internet Archive and many others
University of the People
YouTube.edu
iTunes U
Academic Earth
and more…

I realize that several of these items were in place before or during 2008…however, at that time, there was no dominant, inexpensive alternative. And there still isn’t one that has jumped into the lead (the University of Phoenix with their 150,000+ students doesn’t qualify, as their pricing is not yet nearly aggressive enough as what I’m predicting will occur).

Though we aren’t there yet, there has been significant change that has already taken place. So…if I were an administrator right now, I’d be asking myself the following key questions:

Can we reduce tuition and fees by at least 50%? If not, how can some of our offerings be delivered at half the price (or more)?
How are we going to differentiate ourselves?
How are we going to deliver value?
How are we going to keep from becoming a commodity?
Are we using teams to create and deliver our courses? If not, why not? What’s our plans for staying competitive if we don’t use teams?

Most likely, further massive changes are forthcoming. So fasten your seatbelts and try to stay marketable!

Tagged with: budgetary • change • future • game-changing environment • higher education • innovation • internet • PLE • student-related

Digital Tools Expand Options for Personalized Learning

On 02/04/2010, in education technology, personalized/customized learning, by Daniel Christian

Digital Tools Expand Options for Personalized Learning — from EdWeek.org by Kathleen Kennedy Manzo

Digital tools for defining and targeting students’ strengths and weaknesses could help build a kind of individualized education plan for every student.

Teachers have always known that a typical class of two dozen or more students can include vastly different skill levels and learning styles. But meeting those varied academic needs with a defined curriculum, time limitations, and traditional instructional tools can be daunting for even the most skilled instructor.

Some of the latest technology tools for the classroom, however, promise to ease the challenges of differentiating instruction more creatively and effectively, ed-tech experts say, even in an era of high-stakes federal and state testing mandates. New applications for defining and targeting students’ academic strengths and weaknesses can help teachers create a personal playlist of lessons, tools, and activities that deliver content in ways that align with individual needs and optimal learning methods.

Tagged with: 1:1 • PLE

“Learning itself is a ‘mashup'” — “Learning is messy.”

On 02/01/2010, in learning, personalized/customized learning, teaching & learning, by Daniel Christian

From DSC: A couple of interesting/recent quotes jumped out at me as being very true:

From a webinar that I just learned about which is later tonight entitled “New Learning Communities: Theoretical Frameworks”:
A landscape of new tools has lead to entirely new forms of communication. Learning itself is a ‘mashup.’ Teaching and communicating using online tools creates a conversation that takes place in a cloud. New learning skills and styles emerge. This presentation will introduce three concepts especially relevant to teaching and learning in this potentially overwhelming context: learning ecosystems, organizational biomimicry, and connectivism. This is a concise introduction to what’s new in learning and communication and is meant to provide the background knowledge to support changes in practice.
From Mark Berthelemy’s Reflections on Learning Technologies 2010
We like our systems. I like systems. They help us feel in control of things. Sometimes they’re even useful. The trouble is, the individual process of learning just doesn’t fit nicely in systems. Learning is messy. It happens at the oddest times, for the strangest reasons. Trying to systemise learning is like trying to pick up milk in your hands. Yes, some of it might stick, but that will be the exception rather than the rule.

From DSC:
“Learning itself is a ‘mashup.'” “Learning is messy”. After the numerous learning theories I’ve seen, and the myriad of perspectives regarding what works in education, I’m beginning to agree with these statements. There’s just as much art in teaching & learning as there is science. If someone can prove me wrong here, I’d love it. Give us a clean picture of how people are learning today and it would really help.

I’m wondering if we could create a system that would allow an educator to input which models of learning they believe in, for which subject, and ask them to input some other parameters, and the system/database would recommend some possible learning plans/ideas for them (based upon how they wanted to relay a topic). Hmmm…not sure though…

Anyway, from the items I mentioned above — as well as from my studies in my “Instructional Design for Online Learning” Masters program — I’m just not seeing any kind of silver bullets out there! 🙂

Tagged with: Canada • teaching & learning

Apple Launches iPad
“Apple today introduced iPad, a revolutionary device for browsing the web, reading and sending email, enjoying photos, watching videos, playing games, reading e-books, and much more. Its high-resolution Multi-Touch display lets you interact with content — including 12 innovative new apps designed especially for iPad and almost all of the 140,000 apps available on the App Store. At just 0.5 inches thick and 1.5 pounds, iPad is thinner and lighter than any laptop or notebook. iPad will be available in March starting at the breakthrough price of just $499. ” Read more: apple.com/ipad

Tagged with: Apple • iPad • publishing • TV

Previous Entries Next Entries

Learning Ecosystems

Is ‘The School of One’ the future of schooling? — dangerouslyirrelevant.org

Sonic Pics

The New News Landscape: Rise of the Internet — from PewResearch.org

From DSC:
Sounds an awful lot like where education is heading…portable, personalized, and participatory.

The International Journal of Multimedia & Its Applications (IJMA)

Quote from “Opinion: Internet and Education — Back to the Future”

Digital Tools Expand Options for Personalized Learning

“Learning itself is a ‘mashup'” — “Learning is messy.”

Apple’s new iPad

Categories

Tags

From DSC: Sounds an awful lot like where education is heading…portable, personalized, and participatory.

Categories

Tags

From DSC:
Sounds an awful lot like where education is heading…portable, personalized, and participatory.