Andy Tyerman from Becta also discussed the planning that goes into preparing a school for Personalised Learning and there was some interesting information regarding the pitfalls to avoid when trying to instigate such a level of change management.

Some ideas that I will be exploring in the near future in my lessons:

• Videoing lessons and using this video in order to reflect upon the content
• The use of audio recording
• The Making the News web tool (very good for an online school magazine)

All in all it was a very stimulating day and well worth the trip to sunny Crawley.

Firstly John Lanchester's regular reference to users of this technology as 'geeks' and 'nerds' and secondly the notion that, when using a computer, you are in fact alone.

90+% of my students use social networking sites - and far from fitting the nerdy/geeky stereotype they are in fact a lively bunch of pupils who love writing about themselves and to other people. 

And his use of the word 'alone' bothers me.  Alone is a loaded word - it actually means that we are secluded from social contact with other people and that we are lacking in companions or companionship. When people are blogging, or flickring or digging what are they doing?  They are taking part in social networking sites - the very opposite of 'alone'.

I recently read an article by Tim Rudd of Futurelab, who examines the notion of personalised learning in the UK.
Tim notes that 'new technologies' that enable users to acquire, retrieve, capture and disseminate information have so far been used as mere delivery tools for existing, pre-defined content; as opposed to support truly innovative and personalised learning.  He also notes that many school children use such new technologies as a matter of course in their leisure time, yet formal education has been very slow to embrace them.
I agree with Tim that much of the content delivered today is delivered with at least one eye on the political capital of attaining the highest possible grades.  In other words, the pedagogy is being overlooked, and the needs of the people who are central to this - the learners - are being ignored.  The very opposite of what personalised learning should be.

The article can be found via a link on the Learning Technologies website here.

• gravitate towards group activity
• have a fascination for new technologies
• are racially and ethnically diverse

...In other words the generation that are currently in our schools have a different approach to completing activities (learning or otherwise) to the approach that their teachers might have had at their own schools when they were students.  You can read more about Microsoft's vision but give yourself a few hours and cups of tea to get through it...

Why, indeed, go to the trouble of purchasing, installing and maintaining Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes, when you can plug into entirely web-based services that deliver email just as well?  Mashups are another interesting proposition, and still very immature from a business point of view - however flickrmaps is a good demonstration of the combination of multiple web applications.  The beauty of the salesforce software is that it provides the platform to run these web applications, using an appexchange tool which allows the user to download additional widget-style applications. 

What I like about this is that it provides an environment that could pull together all of your online spreadsheet, word, powerpoint, email, messenging, blogging tools.  At the moment I am trialling/using elgg, google spreadsheets, zoho, moodle, gmail - all of these systems need to be logged into and I would like a single area (used to be called portals!) that would allow me to pull them all together.  I like the look of the web-based desktop application goowy and it has many nice features including 1GB of file storage through box.net (nicely integrated although at beta stage at the moment).  goowy also pulls together email accounts from hotmail/gmail/yahoo and has a 'minis' area which could conceivably evovle into a whole raft of applications like the aforementioned appexchange.

With software like that of salesforce.com and goowy I can see a time when the traditional hegemony of DVD-distributed Operating Systems is challenged.  Couple this with thin client computing (getting fashionable again) and we could have real movement away from the desktop and towards the network.

Marc's vision is that users will be soon creating, running, integrating and delivering documents via the web not just as consumers but in their day-to-day business transactions.  Salesforce has had its fair share of negative reactions to outage, but if business does evolve this way - and it looks as if it might - then there is an even greater need to equip pupils for such a future.

I note from the hallowed pages of techcrunch that Myspace - now standing at 75 million global users - was the most visited site by US users last week, ahead of the normal yahoos and googles.  As the article points out, for many people this is not just another part of the web, it is the central element of their internet experience.  Myspace cannot (yet) be truly thrown in with Web 2.0 technologies (no RSS for example) but it has certainly created social networks where a couple of years ago none were anticipated. 

As educators we have a challenge - to plug into this experience and move away from teaching children how amazing PowerPoint is.

I can see a lot of potential in blogging in terms of giving children a true audience - however there are many potential pitfalls to chats/blogs for a would be teacher and it is very important to have a clear Acceptable Use of...erm, Internet Technologies (?) policy, which parents and students understand.  

I have spoken to my pupils about such technologies, and they all extensively use myspace, bebo, flickr and even zoho (One thing that the students had not come across was goowy - a web-based virtual desktop - very interesting).  The big thing to note here is that pupils are using these technologies, whether their parents or teachers know or care about it or not.  It is, on other words, 'the future' and the sooner teachers become aware of these technologies, the better.  What we cannot - must not - do is ignore these technologies because either we do not understand them, or do not understand how to use them.

The big question for me is - how do we approach this coherently? How does it fit in with the future of education, assessment, whole-school initiatives and nationwide policy?

Interestingly, the report advocates caution over adopting the 'learning styles' approach of treating pupils differently according to their learning style, partly because there is not yet enough evidence of the efficacy of adopting a learning styles approach in the classroom, and partly because it can lead to poor practice. Many teachers still vie learning styles as fixed and innate, and this will almost inevitably lead teachers to label students as having one particularly dominant style, and of providing resources that address just that one particular style. Students will then internalise this label and this could in fact damage the learner's overall development, especially if they are considering their own learning needs using AfL. Similarly, Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligences theory has been embraced by so many practitioners - without true thought of how best they can be applied - that Gardner himself has become alarmed.

The report advocates a push for giving students greater independence in how, when and where they learn. This is the critical element of personalised learning - the meta-cognition element which turns learners into autonomous and intelligent beings, who can recognise different parts of curriculum material and adapt to it, who are ably to critically evaluate their progress and their understanding, and how learn when it is appropriate to seek help from the teacher - having already tried a number of different strategies to solve the problem. As the report notes, pupils who are lacking in meta-cognitive skills tend to be very demanding of a teacher's time because they seek help almost immediately upon encountering a problem. Pupils with meta-cognitive skills "...become co-constructors with the teachers of the process of teaching-and-learning, and progressively transfer the role and function of the teacher to themselves." This sounds to me like the behaviour pupils adopt when learning for their own sake - learning how to operate a PSP, or how to play a new computer game. I know of no pupils who would ask their parents or a teacher how to operate a PSP - they would figure it out for themselves, or they would ask their peers. Many classrooms are still managed very closely by their teachers - the teacher chooses the learning objectives, manages the time and looks at the outcomes for the learner. This places great emphasis on the teacher and is not going to foster independent learning, and as pupils mature they increasingly need this independence. Indeed as technology advances, as LEAs push VLEs and as we all take a good hard look at Personalised Learning, we need to give pupils such opportunities to be independent in their learning styles.

For the full text of the report visit http://www.demos.co.uk/catalogue/aboutlearning