KQED News Mind/Shift – Staff Writer
“There is a lot of talk in ed-tech and ed-reform about personalization right now. There are a lot of folks on the vendor floor at national conferences who will sell you products that supposedly personalize learning, and much of the buzz around something like Khan Academy is that it personalizes the learning for kids. We should be careful about how we use that term, and we should be very skeptical of how well computerized programs can really personalize learning for kids. Most of what we see— especially from curriculum and assessment vendors—involves personalization of pace while still maintaining standardization of content. That’s not good enough. While a program that allows you to take a pretest and then get practice problems and tutorials and videos that are specifically tailored to the things you did poorly on and allows you to practice those things until you can pass the test (a) might raise test scores and (b) might be marginally better than a “traditional” classroom that did not offer choice of content or pace (and we put “traditional” in quotes because legions of teachers have been giving kids real choice for decades), that doesn’t mean we should settle for that. We’ll even grant that these programs have a place in helping students to master the concepts that someone else tells them (and us) they have to learn—and to that end, SLA uses one of these programs to help kids get ready for the state exams—but let’s not call it personalized. Here’s why.”(more)