That was something Garrison Keillor said about his fictional town in Minnesota, Lake Wobegon. Here’s a column from Anya Kamenetz, one of our favorite education innovation thinkers. Sort of asks the question of what we can do now to know the individual.

In the past, the best we could do was try to understand individuals in comparison to something we called average. But average is just a metaphor for measuring, it isn’t something that exists in the real world.

Just like the average family has 1.8 kids. That’s not a reality, that’s a metaphor of measuring, what in the computer age we call an “artifact” of the process. Early efforts to code for images inevitably created a lot of artifacts that greatly affected the quality of the reproduction. Today, we have better codecs, and much higher resolutions, and few artifacts in the way of clear viewing.

Similarly, when viewing the actual people that make up our statistics, we are able to comprehend much higher resolution and see much more of the individuality that exists. Like the flybys of planets, as the camera resolution etc got better, we started seeing a lot more detail, and it’s the detail that contains the meaning.

So for designing DLE, being able to “resolve” as much detail about the individual learner as possible, gives learning that much more power and scope and capability. “Convergence on the Target”, one of the 7 core elements, says we need to account for the details of a locality, and an individual.

We’ve got to let go of putting a group into a study and taking an average and thinking that’s going to be close enough to universal insight.

Now we have something better. We have a natural science of individuality that gives us a surer foundation. We’ve gotten breakthrough insights in a whole range of research, from cancer to child development.

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