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Personalized Learning: the Best Education Or the Worst?
theodp writes: In an exclusive interview with Education Week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked about why he is shifting his K-12 giving priorities to personalized learning. While acknowledging that there's not yet any independent, large-scale research to show personalized learning's effectiveness, Zuck argues that "the model just intuitively makes sense." But just days later, Fordham University professor Mark Naison wrote in the Washington Post about why the personalized learning efforts of 'a growing number of those with investment capital seeking profitable outlets,' which presumably includes Zuck, make him 'incredibly pessimistic' about the future of public education. That Zuck — like fellow personalized learning cheerleaders/funders Bill Gates and former U.S. Education Chief Arne Duncan — seemed to be unaware of studies on personalized learning studies that date back to the '70s is troubling. But people don't "Like" 40+ year-old Ed.gov papers, so Zuck could be forgiven for not seeing them and, as a result, believing that the personalized learning plan dashboard his Facebook engineers knocked out truly is the ground-breaking solution to 'one of education's biggest problems' that Melinda Gates cracks it up to be.
I don't know who said, "the more you know, the more you realize you don't know," but this is not the conclusion a great number of intelligent people automatically arrive at.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
While acknowledging that there's not yet any independent, large-scale research to show personalized learning's effectiveness, Zuck argues that "the model just intuitively makes sense."
All sorts of things "just make sense" that are actually completely wrong when objectively examined. That's why we do experiments to see if they actually work before rolling them out in a big way. Basing policy on a hunch is REALLY stupid unless you have no other choice and this is not one of those times where we have no other choice. Maybe he's in the test phase but it sure doesn't sound like an experiment. It's annoying how Zuckerberg (and Gates) thinks that because he was successful in software that it somehow qualifies him to be something more than a bank account for areas of endeavor where he demonstrably has no special expertise or insight. At least Gates no longer has a day job so conceivably he has the time to actually devote to the details of these issues. There is no way Zuckerberg actually has enough time to really do much more than parrot what the people he hired are telling him.
The problem with 40+ years old studies on computer aided learning is the computing lanscape has changed so much since then they are mostly irrelevant. Even the University of Illinois at Urbana is making the shift offering on-line education.
Online is personalized expect in the simplest of senses; i.e. you get to chose your pace but the content and flow is the same for everyone.
To me, personalized learning requires some degree of tailoring the material to the student; and therein lies the challenge. Doing that get expensive quickly, and we have shown time and time again a lack of willingness to invest in education.
The one area I have seen personalized learning is in special education, where teachers create individualized instruction plans of reach student based on their ability to learn. Even then, it generally devolves into simply doing the same thing but slower or with an aide rather than a tailored learning plan; simply because when you have to do 15 of them their is simply not enough time to tailor them and the county sure as hell ain't paying for another teacher or two needed to really tailor and deliver the material. As a result, I doubt it ever catches on at the public school level. I have seen it in college, where you can take lab courses under a professor and do your own thing after you've mastered the basics.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Yes, all the studies showing problems with personalized learning are simply showing that we had not yet figured out how to do it well.
No, we know exactly how to do it *well*. Each student's parents just need to hire an individual full-time tutor for their kid, who can then teach them in whatever way best suits that individual kid.
The problem is that we haven't found a way to to it *economically* or *practically* for all those students whose parents can't afford to hire an individual tutor.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.