Friday 5 December 2014

#oeb14 Stephen Downes on personalised #learning

These are liveblogging notes from Stephen Downes keynote.

Preoccupations around the learner, and how they seem to be pro-active online, but rather passive in face-to-face situations. The idea of the learners as citizens and learners as consumers.
How do we equip the learners of today for the jobs today and in the future.

Stephen Downes on reclaiming personalised learning
The overall theme is that education is in for a reality check. The reality check he wants to share is that education and educational companies must face the fact that they no longer own the learners nor their learning.
The learner is no longer the customer, the learner is now the product. Maybe in the form of tuition fees, maybe in the form of big data.
When they talk about the learning process, the core concept is about being interactive, repurposing, about personal learning.
To teach is to model and demonstrate, to learn is to reflect and construct.
Learning is a form of recognition. It is something that feels natural, and that grows following patterns, this enables recognition.

Reclaiming the web, means it is important to have his own space, this is what is meant by reclaiming. The concept of bringing back to us of what is ours.
Education has been the march of the LMS – the giant silos of learning. Once you leave the LMS institution, your own content is lost. Education as a discipline where the personal content is no longer personal in many occasions. We must not only reclaiming the content, but we must reclaim the production, the process.

Stephen distinguishes between personal learning and personalized learning. Personal learning is all your own learning. Personalized you take from the shelf and tweek and then say: it is personalised. Metaphor: caramel and caramelized.

The web is not a platform, it is a bunch of personal spaces. This is the basis for the cMOOCs in 2008. The fact that these mooc were distributed added to the fact that this learning was personal. This created a network where the participants genuiinly owned their learning. But what followed took the learning away from the personal to the personalized again, where the data was no longer personal.

Learning data, learning data are important, but should not be commoditised. Not everything needs to be commercialized. Institutions need to learn this distinction: let it go. Platforms and proprietors do not own the  data. The data should belong to the person.
Why? They do not own this market no matter what they think. But a person should be able to choose from ALL sources, if you are locked into a platform what you can see is not visible. This is top down control, which is something we do not need for learning. Learning is not acquiring something, but becoming something. We do not become something by consuming prehashed content, but by resharing, creating, recreating content that is of importance to us as a personal learner.

Analytics purports to tell you who you are. All humans are put into 16 categories, There is a distinction between big data and personal data. Big data= many people using one service, personal data is the one person using many data services = deep analysis. This truly tells the story of ‘me’. And who would want that all this personal data would be given to outsiders.
Personal network versus institutional library. Personal network of connections, resources and content that you as a person aggregate.
Education as the commodity, not the student. The things we do belong to us, the person.

With that in mind that Stephen supports the idea of reclaiming personal learning

LPSS – learning and performance support systmes: It is a network of personal learning environments.
http://lpss.me – prototype PLE – it does instantiate the end to end solution of personal learning, and storing it in a space of your choice.
The design is based on putting the learner at the center connecting to services and institutes. It is not a platform, but a connector of resources and services. To be used for your own purposes and goods. The idea of Ed Net Neutrality.
No matter which provider, they should not indicate what you should do. The personal learning record – data owned by the individual, shared only with persmissions.
Look at downes eporfolio-and-bades-workshop-oeb14.hml

Relevant PLR (personal learning projects). Third parties can provide analytics services, but they do not get free unfettered access
Analytics as a service….
(inge check out owncloud)

We collectively need to decide whether our own personal data is something that needs to be commoditised or should be reclaimed as a person, as an individual.


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