Personalisation through Learner Generated Contexts

Personalisation, like the term e-learning is a word that can cause confusion, and even consternation. So here is a thought about personalisation that a few colleagues and myself have been considering. It addresses the need for us to consider the evolution of learning in a technology rich environment. It also has the potential to alter the nature of knowledge, as we ‘know’ it.

What are Learner Generated Contexts?

A Learner Generated Context can be defined as a context created by people interacting together with a common, self-defined learning goal. For example,

If we take the view that a context can be described as a user centric ecology of resources Ecology of Resurces then a user-generated context is one in which a learner or a group of learners marshal the resources available to them to create an ecology that meets their needs. Such a context is formed from resource elements:

1. Knowledge or Content about the world that the users want to understand. This can be organized formally into a curriculum or be grounded in the environment.
2. People and the tools they use to communicate with each other and with their environment in order to understand knowledge
3. Location or Environment and its organizational constraints

Each of these elements has been historically defined over time. Likewise, each of the learners brings to the interaction their own personal history of previous interactions within the world.

In some senses all contexts can be described in this way: all are created from some combination of human enterprise in the world. The key aspect of Learner Generated Contexts is that they are generated through the enterprise of those who would previously have been consumers in a context created for them. For example,

Members of a community environmental centre use a variety of technologies to
• Collect and publish data, for example about pollution gathered from a local sensor network;
• Offer a resource bank of information, for example through a wiki so that anyone who is interested can contribute to the body of knowledge about the local environment. This includes links to other relevant local resources such as area maps, recycling points and conservation areas;
• Allow people to discuss issues of importance.

These resources enable the group to attract the attention of local politicians so that they have a voice for environmental issues. They are also used as the basis for a course that all centre volunteers take when they join.

Learner Generated Contexts are closely related to the notion of User Generated Content., such as You Tube (http://www.youtube.com/) , Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/), Wikis, Blogs and other forms of Social Software. The difference is that in a Learner Generated Context, learners take this a stage further. They are involved in creating the environment in which they, their peers and mentors can adopt and use appropriate tools to communicate and generate content (knowledge) that is validated as being an accepted representation of knowledge in a particular area.

In this version of personalisation the role of technology is in the provision of scaffolding to support learners (and their teachers) in their creation of the content, tools and environment that will best meet their needs.

Trackback

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 10th, 2007 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Flux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.