The World Is My School: Welcome to the Era of Personalized Learning

Learning and Education Sci/Tech by Maria H. Andersen

Future learning will become both more social and more personal, says an educational technology expert.

Humans have always been learning, but how we learn has changed over time. The earliest means of education were highly personal: Oral histories passed from adults to children, informal or formal apprenticeships, and one-on-one tutoring have all been used in the early history of most cultures. It’s only been in the last two centuries that we’ve used formalized systems of mass public education (aka industrialized education).

Certainly, personalized learning is the more effective method. In 1984, educational researcher Benjamin Bloom found that average students who were tutored one-on-one outperformed 98% of students who were learning via conventional methods (this is referred to as Bloom’s two-sigma problem). However, personal learning is not cost-effective, and so we currently educate students in batches of 20, 30, or even 200 students at a time. This is likely to get worse before it gets better, with prominent philanthropists like Bill Gates declaring that “the best lectures in the world” will be online within the next five years. Certainly we can use technology to deliver those lectures to thousands, or even millions, of students at a time, but a lecture does not automatically produce learning any more than attending a class does.

Mass education is adequate, as long as students are highly motivated to learn and get ahead of their peers. In developing countries, a student who is successful in education will be able to climb the ladder of personal economic prosperity faster than those who are not successful. But in industrialized countries, where prosperity is the norm, an education does not necessarily translate into a significantly higher standard of living. In these countries, there is no longer a large economic incentive to learn, so the motivation to learn must become intrinsic. As we redesign en masse education, we must address learners’ intrinsic motivations, which means that education must circle back to being personal again.

The vision of a modern education built around personalized learning is not new, but it is definitely tantalizing. Neal Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age (Spectra, 1995) shares a vision of personalized learning in the future via an interactive book that possesses a conversational interface (CI) and “pseudo-intelligence,” a kind of artificial intelligence (AI) that is inferior to human intelligence. It’s likely that we’ll see decent conversational interfaces within the next decade, and certainly applications like Google Voice are moving us much closer to this reality. AI that is capable of directing the learning needs of a human will take much longer, developing in the next 20–50 years, but we can’t wait that long for the technology to catch up with education. The need for personalized learning exists in the here and now. So how does one bridge this vision of the future with the realities of the present?

Learning Technologies Today

Let’s start by taking stock of the personalized technologies for information that we already have. We have software that stores the content we like (e.g., Evernote, Posterous) and software that merely stores the location of that content (e.g., Diigo or Delicious). Even traditional media, like books, now have parallel digital systems that allow for note taking, highlighting, and bookmarking (e.g., Kindle, Nook, or iPad). While it’s useful to store and search information, I would venture that we rarely go back to look at the information we mark for storage.

This is a problem; for deep learning to occur, we need to have repeated exposure to the information, along with some time in between for reflection. We need to give our brains a repeated opportunity to process the information we take in so that it becomes knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. This means we’re going to have to find time in our busy lives to reflect on the information that flows past us on a daily basis, and we’re going to need some kind of technology that keeps us on track with our learning goals.

While it seems outrageous that we could find any more time in our busy lives, consider some of the disruptive changes we’ve seen quite recently that affect how we spend our free time. Facebook, now with 500 million users, has disrupted normal social interactions in a little over six years. Micro-blogging exploded when a Web site simply invited us to answer the question: What’s on your mind? Twitter users now send more than 50 million tweets per day, and big news stories break first on Twitter—in real time and with eyewitness accounts. As big as Twitter is, there were more people playing Farmville (a social media game on Facebook) at its peak than there were active Twitter users—a fact that has not gone unnoticed by game designers and educators. These Farmville players are choosing to spend their free time for collaborative activities (their “cognitive surplus,” as media scholar Clay Shirky puts it) plowing virtual soil and planting virtual crops.

These innovative social disruptions have happened quickly, but not from within the existing organizational structures. For example, Facebook did not disrupt phone communication by changing the nature of phone calls or phones. Facebook built an entirely new system that eventually circled back around to phones by the way of phone apps. In the same way, the trick to developing a personal learning system is to abandon thinking about how to build it from within the existing educational system and to begin pondering how such a system could be developed outside of education. Educational institutions form a vast interconnected network, and while small changes can occur within the system, individual parts only have the ability to flex within their existing boundaries. For a personalized learning system to take hold inside education, it will have to be built on the outside.

A Simple Idea: Learn This

Let me propose a realistic scenario of what a true personalized learning system might look like and how it would function. We first have to create (1) a new layer of learning media in the background of the existing Internet and (2) an ecosystem of software to easily manage the learning media we engage with. In the same way we’ve integrated buttons like Twitter’s “Tweet this” and Facebook’s “Like” at the end of videos, articles, and other media, imagine we now add a button for “Learn This.” Clicking this button (anywhere you find it) would bring you into an interface to help you learn the content.

We don’t need a humanlike artificial intelligence to begin this journey. The technology for such a journey already exists and is simple enough to use with traditional learning methods. In the first version, learning should simply be by way of Socratic questioning, where questions are used to analyze concepts, to prod at the depth of knowledge, and to focus on principles, issues, or problems. Socratic questions are elegant because, unlike with other formats (e.g., multiple choice), learners must self-generate the answers rather than rely heavily on the ability to recognize a correct answer when they see it. The personal learning system would use a spaced repetition algorithm (SRA) to reintroduce the Socratic questions over time so that biological memory is more likely to grasp onto the ideas and information. For now, let’s call this system SOCRAIT (a play on “Socratic” that includes SOC for social, AI for artificial intelligence, and IT for information technology within its name).

Learn This! SOCRAIT Questions for “The World Is My School”

Author Maria H. Andersen offers the following questions as sample Socratic-learning prompts for readers of this article.

• What technologies are we likely to see in personalized learning systems on the 20–50 year horizon?

• What arguments are made for the likelihood that we can “find” the free time to engage in a personal learning system?

• Why are Socratic questions and spaced repetition algorithms (SRA) an elegant solution to the personalized learning problem?

• How are responses evaluated in the proposed SOCRAIT system?

• What evidence do we have that people will be willing to put in the cognitive energy to create a learning layer on the Web?

• How could SOCRAIT be used by journalism to improve the revenue stream?

• How would the SOCRAIT model change the way we consume media?

• What are Socratic scholars and what function do they serve?

• If SOCRAIT were implemented, how would the role of educators shift?

• What is the “game layer for learning” and why is it necessary for something like SOCRAIT to work?

• What is needed to build a system like SOCRAIT?

For example, suppose I read an article about digital copyright in educThe World Is My School: Welcome to the Era of Personalized Learning | World Future Society