On 8 Dec 2006 I attended a workshop on “Personalisation of Learning” in Manchester, organised by the HEA’s Supporting Sustainable e-Learning Forum (SSeLF).

The day consisted of presentations by Oleg Liber (Bolton) and Mike Halm (Penn State), seeking to define what “personalisation” means and how it might be implemented in e-learning.

The workshop was much better than I had expected. Both presentations were thought-provoking, and the quality of discussion amongst the participants was high. The structure was good, with the two knowledgeable presenters using their presentations to stimulate discussion amongst the audience.

Oleg Liber’s talk investigated what we mean by “personalisation”, and sought to define what a “personal learning environment” might be. He immediately rearranged the space so that the audience were sitting in groups rather than rows, and his two-hour session was punctuated with a number of discussion periods from which we fed back the outcomes. After exploring questions such as “what is personalisation?”, “what is the difference between personal and personalised?” and “what is a PLE, and what is it not?”, he moved on to demonstrate his own vision of a PLE, a prototype system called Plex.

Mike Halm’s presentation started with an overview of the state of university teaching, using quotes from various books, especially Declining by Degrees, which looks interesting. However, there were also some rather dubious quotes, for example an assertion that “85% of learning takes place in informal contexts” which I suspect belongs in the “97% of statistics are made up” category. Later in the talk, Mike attempted to bring learning styles into the picture, which prompted a discussion about the validity of such things that went on for some time and was quite interesting, even if it did use up most of Mike’s remaining time. Finally, he demonstrated his own model of a PLE – a system called LionShare.

More detailed Personalisation workshop notes