The Forecast Calls for Customization

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In a recent article by Meris Stansbury, she quotes, Julie Mathiesen, with tongue planted firmly in cheek,  as saying, “The current Industrial Age system of education is working perfectly if you’re looking for 25 percent skilled and 75 percent unskilled students." As we move away from being an industrial society and the focus shifts to information management, we as educators need to prepare students for the uncertain and rapidly-changing world that lies ahead.

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="500" caption="Terminator Glasses Are a Reality (Photo from Flickr - Some rights reserved by Dunechaser)"][/caption]

With one time Hollywood dreams becoming a reality, the idea that anything is possible is looking more and more like a reality. So what will education look like in five, ten, fifteen years time? If I were a betting man, I would probably say that the safe bet would be that education systems won't be tremendously different than they are now. Sure, textbooks may be accessed through tablets and maybe students will be posting more of their work online to share it in blogs or videos or Voicethreads but ultimately, these are just fancier ways of doing the same thing that's been done for as long as anyone can remember. Education can be transformed, can be changed and can evolve with technologies that already exist. Some likely obstacles that may be preventing this include tight budgets or poorly managed boards of education. Ultimately though, the biggest roadblock probably comes down to six simple words: "It's always been done this way."

As a grand oversimplification, people do not like change. Every time Facebook makes a change, there seems to be an endless stream of statuses deriding it and websites devoted to ways of 'getting the old Facebook back.' There are just so many people involved in the various education systems around the world that it's difficult to actually implement any change. It's the same reason Kodak filed for bankruptcy. It's not as if they couldn't see that film was on the way out and digital was the way forward. Unfortunately, they were just too heavily invested in their existing model and turning around a lumbering dinosaur is no mean feat. The education system is in a similar position. The current system is not going to be effective for supporting learning with the obvious digital shift that is happening in the world. Rather than dwell on the fact that I don't actually think the education system will change much in the next fifteen years or so, I'll take this opportunity to talk about customized learning and how it could be key to successful learning in the future.

For the most part, many schools and teachers still use a one size fits all model of education. The other day, my wife, who teachers year 4 (ages 8-9ish), said to me, "Before NIST, I never differentiated Math for my students based on their 'where they're at' with their understanding. Now, I write at least five different Math lessons each day for a range of students' abilities and I can't imagine not doing that anymore." It's funny how something can seem so daunting at first but once you've started doing it, it becomes natural and even gets to a point where you can't believe you weren't doing this before. In a recent article by Shantanu Sinha, President of Khan Academy, he quotes a video game company CEO as saying, "If we build a game in which someone is demotivated or disengaged for 45 seconds, we know we need to improve." People, especially young people, expect constant stimulation from a range of sources. And what industry has more experience in maintaining constant engagement than the video game industry?

Video games provide almost constant stimulation for the mind and, to an increasing degree, the body. When a person plays a video game, they are left to their own devices to progress and improve through the game towards an end goal.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="165" caption="My custom Mii (Frighteningly Accurate)"][/caption]

The player may decide that they need to defeat more enemies to gain combat experience or they may decide to collaborate with other networked players to join together to accomplish a particular task. Whatever they decide, they are doing so themselves with a specific and known goal in mind. Their path through the game is unique from every other player's path. At their own pace, players aim for continual improvement with aspirations of mastery. From custom avatars in these games to customized home screens to customized running shoes, people are getting more and more used to a world which is becoming more and more custom tailored to their interests.

I think the current estimate says that information doubles every 1-1.5 years (though IBM said that number could be closer to 11 hours!). The idea of teaching the same content to every student is just not a reasonable expectation anymore. "But wait!" you say, "students need to know about The American Civil War or Niels Bohr's contributions to quantum mechanics or Who Shot J.R.!" While personally, I think that students are richer for knowing such things, the fact is that they'll do just fine if they don't know it. This is simply content and content is abundant. You just need to know where to get it. Putting learning in a conceptual and context based approach in which students can use knowledge to solve problems that are relevant to them will be key to developing dynamic, adaptable learners that the future will need.

This Thursday, Google is taking a big and, from my point of view, logical step forward in unifying their privacy policy to have one single privacy policy across their entire product line. Their greatest motivation behind this is to better identify everything you do across the web to offer you more tailored services which, if done right, should provide users with a more enjoyable and relevant online experience (not to mention allowing them to provide more effective advertising and line their shareholders' pockets). With this kind of behavioural analysis possible, I'll leave this post with a question.  Could Should schools try to take Google's lead and collect usage statistics in an effort to help deliver each student with a custom tailored educational experience? Discuss.