Come see me at TIES - Its Personal!

This year I will be presenting one pre-conference workshop, one poster session (which was originally going to be a community of interest session), and co-presenting two general sessions at the TIES Conference in Minneapolis, MN. The theme of the conference is "It's Personal! Transforming Pedagogy with Technology."

I intend with these sessions to raise the question of what the difference is between personAL and personalIZED since from the keynote speaker and featured speaker lists it seems no distinction was made. Hopefully this was done intentionally with hopes of invoking a debate. In fact, School of One founder Joel Rose is giving the opening keynote address. In case you are unfamiliar with School of One, it is a new school model which takes testing, student profiling, and differentiated instruction to new heights of programmed instruction letting an algorithm determine a student's educational journey.


"I love the algorithm." That line always gets me. Anyway, with the keynote on Monday being Joel Rose and the keynote on Tuesday speaking about video games in education I sense a strong grip of scientific management taking hold with this agenda. In Seymour Papert's (1993) book Mindstorms he said, "In most contemporary educational situations where children come into contact with computers the computer is used to put children through their paces, to provide exercises of an appropriate level of difficulty, to provide feedback, and to dispense information. The computer programming the child." I want to see children programming the computer. I want to see children in charge of their own learning. Problem is, programming children is easily marketable, teaching children to program is not.

So, here are the sessions I will be presenting. I hope to see you there:

• "I Didn't Know I Could Do That with a Cell Phone!" (Pre-conference Workshop) - TIES Conference, December 11, 2011, MPLS, MN
• "Citizen Journalism in the Classroom" (session) - TIES Conference, December 13, 2011, MPLS, MN
• "Web 2.0 and Social Constructivism" (poster session) - TIES Conference, December 12, 2011, MPLS, MN
• "The Power of Many: How (and Why) to Organize Your Own Unconference" (session) - TIES Conference, December 13, 2011, MPLS, MN

Also, on another note, I just had a lesson plan on Citizen Journalism published at EDTECH: Focus on K-12. Check it out and let me know what you think.

• Transforming Students into Citizen Journalists

Who is learning personalized for?

This is a hard term for me to included in my ongoing list of problematic terms simply because I have been such a supporter of the concept it represents. Nonetheless, I fear that "personalized learning" is a flawed term. It is flawed not because the idea of crafting a plan with the educational and motivational needs of an individual in mind is a bad idea, it is the idea that what is being personalized is learning. Let me explain.

Aside from the popular theory that learning is social (which I a little more than partially buy into), isn't for the individual and their acquisition of new understandings really always a personal endeavor? Can one person really personalize the learning of someone else? Or can this only be done by the individual? And, how can such an act be done consciously without foreknowledge of the content of said learning? Don't I personalize my learning when I choose what books to read, which videos to watch, what classes to take, or what places to go for myself? If these things are done for me is what the person putting together my agenda doing really personalizing my learning or are they personalizing my agenda? Isn't it up to me as a learner to decide whether or not to accept that agenda?

Don't get me wrong, I know there are times when a person really needs, and sometimes will willingly submit to, a plan laid out for them. But, as far as education goes, that custom-made plan is not personalized learning, it is really a customized agenda. For there to really be personalized learning the learner has to have the agency to decide what it is that they are doing, what it is they are paying attention to, what it is that they are busying their mental faculties with. In fact, no matter what kind of path we lay down for the learner, be it customized, individualized, standardized, or scripted they will always personalize their own learning because no teacher, curriculum developer, lecturer, or programmer can dictate the course of the integral organ involved in the process of learning. No one can grab the attention of a learner without their choice to pay attention, no one can make a learner think without the learner choosing to do so, no one can make someone reflect on something without the learner choosing to reflect on their own, and unless you employ the kind of inhumane contraption used in the film A Clockwork Orange no one can force another to open their eyes and see something they do not choose to.

Regardless of posters hung in some schools stating that "failure is not an option," failure is always an option. It is always a choice. So is learning. We choose what we pay attention to and in so doing we personalize our own learning. We also personalize our own learning through differing experiences. Every student comes to a classroom with different experiences, memories, and backgrounds. These things are what makeup a person's prior knowledge and that prior knowledge will further act to personalize the learning of students in any classroom. We often learn different things from the same stimuli because we all approach it with different background knowledge and therefore our learning is always personalized.

We really need a new term to describe what we mean when we say "personalized learning."


This post is eight in my "war on words" series. Other terms in this series are: "best practices," "child-centered," "value added," accountability, "data-driven decisions," "learning objectives," and "21st Century."