If last week was a “normal” end of June, I would have spent five or six days attending the ISTE Conference, this year in San Antonio. This year I had to skip the event and join the #notatiste crowd.
But I wonder just how much I missed by not being there in person.
I certainly regret not having the rare opportunity to see friends and colleagues face-to-face. Beyond that, it wasn’t hard to keep up with the big ideas being tossed around in the convention center, thanks to the active stream of tweets, posts, podcasts, and video.
1Anyway, one concept that seemed to be all over the place was “personalization”. Presenters discussed how to personalize instruction. Vendors offered thousands of products to help the process. Visionaries talked of how artificial intelligence (AI) would personalize education.
But to me all of that seemed very, very familiar. Haven’t we tried this before?
Twenty years ago, when I was transitioning out of the classroom and into edtech training, I worked with several elementary schools whose principals had bought into a system called SuccessMaker. It was an expensive “programmed learning” system contained on dozens of CDs that was supposed to improve student learning in reading and math.
The software presented the students with activities wrapped with animated characters and, based on the child’s response, moved them through the lessons. The developer recommended that students should spend 20 minutes a day on their system. I remember clearly a trainer from the company promising teachers they would see tremendous improvement in test scores very quickly. And that students would be highly motivated to learn because they like using technology.
So, how is that system different from those that were being promoted at ISTE? I’m not sure much has really changed in those twenty years.
Those new “personalized” learning systems on the ISTE vendor floor likely use much more sophisticated algorithms to tailor lessons for students. They certainly collect far more data, sending it to the cloud to be processed along with information on tens of thousand students. As opposed to relying on the basic information provided by the teacher and storing individual student records on a single, non-networked machine.
Plus the marketing hasn’t changed much. Developers still promise miracle jumps in test scores. They still emphasize high student engagement because “technology”.
And, as with those systems from two decades ago, none of the learning is really personal.