Personalized learning good, social learning better

At the CoSN CTO clinic in San Diego, I presented the basic idea of long tail learners and how technology is transforming education. The best part about presenting is the response from the crowd. We engaged in a lively discussion about Long Tail Learning.

I sensed a frustrated listener and called her later to follow up. Karen LaBonte is a former classroom art teacher who is now at the San Diego County Office of Education. She felt that we had already moved away from the Bell Curve to more personalized or individualized education. In her mind, we are already doing a tremendous amount of work to address the long tail or the leading and lagging students on the bell curve.

I actually agree with Karen. We are in a transition. NCLB actually mandates that we not only teach to the middle of the bell curve but engage all students. However, the idea of the long tail is that the lagging and leading students don’t need an individual solution, they need access to the niche learners who are like them. They should still have the benefit and joy of learning with others, but without aggregation and the ability to breakdown the constraints of time and place in today’s classroom, that odd student may not find any like-minded fellows to pursue learning with. Instead of personalized learning, I would argue that the goal of schools should be social learning.

What seems to be happening in classrooms where a single teacher must teach within a period of time, in a classroom, a particular group of students is that the lagging students receive the extra attention to meet NCLB. The leading students, the ones ahead of the curve, are left to fend for themselves. Their success is not measured or required. See “Top Students Said to Stagnate Under NCLB” in EdWeek June 18, 2008, by Debra Viadero.

What do you think of personalized learning vs social learning?