Four or five years ago now, adaptive learning based on real time analytics of user generated data related to thousands of other users… was a new idea. It was a new upgraded version of formative assessment and a new promise of learning enabled to give learners precisely the material/ content that they needed.
Today, that promise is expanding to include more aspects of learning, and a broader and deeper understanding of what “learning content” is, and how it can be embedded in real time experience for users that’s tailored to “just in time learning“.
Another way to think of about this: curation is providing just the right content in all contexts, and applies to learning too.
Curation must examine not just a fixed content tree, but an improvised “search” of all available content that determines what is most relevant, and that involves a lot of different variables. Including taxonomy…and real time analysis of social learning constructs…and anticipation of potentially relevant material that must be tested in real time to find out “if it’s appropriate”.
A speaker or presenter must be able to anticipate and change in midstream what “might work” as content with a particular group at a particular time. Clearly, that’s hard to do.
It’s a huge undertaking to incorporate into analytics and algorithms all the pieces of data that “should be” incorporated, and to exclude the data that can be judged irrelevant. In short, it’s like playing consciousness cop, or “data god”. Here’s some discussion on some aspects of the challenge.
(human consciousness is a form of curation, selecting what parts of sensory perception and mental processes (mind) to pay attention to in the moment, and what to ignore. Making this even more complex is the reality of the “unconscious” aspects of mind, such as Freud, Jung and others have posited, and which current understandings of mind and brain seem to re-inforce.
The so called “tip of the iceberg” model for consciousness, with the submerged part of awareness being much the greater in mass. Curation must somehow account for these “present but not accounted for”, elements of mind.
[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Putting-“Learning”-Back-in-Analytics-Eduventures.pdf”]