Talk:1 Introduction and background

From Stellar Deliverable 1.1

1 What is the real tension? Crowd v Personalisation, or Expert v Individual?

The question that we want to raise concerns the nature of the 'tension' between crowd-sourcing and personalisation:

• On one level, there do seem to be visible tensions between group and personalisation TEL agendas. For example, some teachers do say that the assessment agenda has constrained and limited their use of Web 2.0 tools, and our research has confirmed this in schools /REFERENCE NEEDED/.

• however, we want to challenge the notion that there is any deep or philosophical incompatibility between the two agendas: for example, personalised learning can emerge from guided paths through a crowd-sourced corpus (cf. WHURLE, in which chunks of knowledge originate from a pool of contributors /REFERENCE NEEDED/).

• part of the problem here is that different groups are competing to own the definition of 'personalisation'; some seem to be directly related to 1960s models of learning with technology, but others are much more open, with not only a personalised e-portfolio space, but a personalised curriculum and personalised learning platform to support it.

A very real source of tension--and one that is worthy of our serious exploration across nations--concerns the authority of knowledge, and the definition of an 'expert'; it is the case that in crowd-sourced knowledge environments, any member of the crowd can make an equally valid contribution. Ultimate validity can be determined by a variety of models, from totally democratic to expert-weighted. In traditional 'personalised learning' models, authority is external, but this need no be so--there is no reason in principle why it should not be filtered, negotiated and earned through consensus.

2 Are we too radical?

Do we really think that TEL research can engage teachers and learners "in new ways of learning in order to radically change both what it means to learn and what it is possible to learn"? It would be already a great advancement to identify those problems and issues that TEL research can contribute to address and solve. This approach would not bind TEL potential of innovation, but will allow to avoid the disappointments that a too high level vision of the field might prepare.