https://thesprouts.org/blog/rendering-learners-legible
Educators talk a lot about ‘personalization.’ Is the animating purpose of “personalization” in to render students legible? If it is, could Sal Khan take the Hippocratic oath?
“The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside.” — George Orwell, ‘As I Please’
inBloom’s mission is to “inform & involve each student & teacher with data & tools designed to personalize learning.” Focus on that word, “personalize.” At the moment, this is an exciting word for many people in education. In this crowd, there is a common distinction between ‘transmission’ and ‘construction’ as metaphors for teaching (construed as transmitting information) & learning (construed as constructing a mental model).
Framing teaching in terms of ‘transmission’ makes it a problem of communication and information. You become naturally concerned with clarity and structure and prerequisites. Issues like classroom management or student engagement become constraints that buttress or obstruct the primary focus: communicating to students.
Although this in fact is what typically happens in many classrooms, the party line of graduate schools of education and the broader world of educational theory is that transmission’s no good. So, you’ll often see teachers’ email signatures cite Yeats’ “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” or Hutchins’ “The objective of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.” before going back to a classroom where they stand at the front.
Framing learning in terms of “construction” makes it a problem of giving students puzzles, projects, and experiences that develop their mental models. You become naturally concerned with engagement and epistemology and ideas’ expressive power. Issues like curriculum or assessment become constraints that buttress or obstruct the primary focus: surfacing & iterating learners’ models.
If this happens in classrooms, you’ll see it under the banner of ‘project-based learning’ or ‘learning by doing’ or ‘hands-on.’ But as with any words, these can and have been corrupted and diluted, often to denote their precise opposite, for myriad reasons—most driven by the gap between our nominal values and our functional priorities for education.
While progressive educators have reached nominal consensus that ‘construction’ trumps ‘transmission,’ that is not the point I’m trying to make. I just want to highlight the distinction these two, broad, rhetorical camps offer; I think it has a lot to teach us about personalization.
But before considering personalization in education, it is instructive to look around and consider ‘personalization’ in other domains. We should be suspicious any time we notice that classic trick of marketing something whose inverse is unimaginable—after all, who wouldn’t want personalized education? If you cannot invert the reform and find something someone reasonable might disagree with, you have a platitude on your hands. And platitudes that front for reforms corrupt their language and often end up running defense for other, more obscure dynamics.
Netflix doesn’t talk much about personalization—they’ve had an incredibly consistent focus on becoming the “best way to rent a movie” since they began in 1999. Now, their value proposition is, “For one low monthly price, Netflix members can watch as much as they want, anytime, anywhere, on nearly any Internet-connected screen. Members can play, pause and resume watching, all without commercials or commitments.” You have to dig around a bit to find mention of their ratings system, “It’s only Members can rate the movies and TV shows they’ve watched through their TV or on the Netflix website. Netflix takes these ratings and pairs them with billions of other ratings by other Netflix members to accurately predict movies and TV shows members will enjoy.” This despite the fact that they famously hosted a million-dollar competition to improve the accuracy of their predictions.
So, what problem is personalization solving for Netflix? Well Netflix wants people to watch more movies. Finding movies that people want to watch is a natural solution to this. Sometimes, people don’t know what they want to watch or what they’d like. So a matching algorithm helps them find something customers want.
Imagine it’s your girlfriend’s birthday. You want to get her a gift. Do you get her a personalized gift? “Well, sure.” But you probably don’t use that language unless you’re monogramming or tailoring it. (Set those examples to the side; we’ll be seeing more like them.) We assume gifts are personalized unless they’re giveaway swag. How do you personalize your gift? Well, hopefully you know them well enough to simulate whether they’d like a given trinket. Sometimes we need help brainstorming trinkets, but rarely—at least with those girlfriends we know well—do we need help deciding whether they’ll like it. To brainstorm, you might browse their Pinterest or keep a list of things they want or head to their social wishlist.
So, what problem is this process of personalization solving for you? It’s helping you find something they want.
Imagine you’re single. And 26. Most of your friends from college have moved on. You’ve just finished your graduate program and are quickly discovering you never actually learned how to make friends. Much less find a date. Luckily, there’s an app for that. So you fill out your OKCupid profile, answer their hundred-question personality test, and start browsing. When you use OKCupid’s special blend or Quiver features, you’re getting personalized dating advice and matchmaking.
But unlike our examples so far, it’s subtler than “helping you find what you want.” Sure, you can search for “single, straight, very attractive blond, measurements 36-24-36, looking for casual sex in my area” but that’s not what OKCupid is for. In OKCupid, personalization is a mix of matching and satisfying you. OKCupid aspires to find people you want whom you have some better-than-average chance of getting whom also want you.