A different kind of personalisation: let's learn from our kids

When adults sit down to design a VLE, intranet or new website with some degree of user interaction, the notion of personalisation, if it's acknowledged at all, is often restricted to a palette of possible templates, the ability to add a photo or MP3, or perhaps a 'flashbox' à la Bebo, where users can import some content from a photo- or video-sharing website. This needs to change.

While the desire to emulate the best bits of what goes on in the hugely popular social networking sites like Bebo or MySpace or Facebook is admirable, I'm not convinced those designing learning environments online have a) spent enough time on the teens' social networks of choice or b) looked at them critically, getting beyond the sherbet on the surface.

A new report by Nielson/NetRatings reveals exactly what young people want out of their web, and, put simply: they want it to be theirs. (You have to pay to view the report...)

The top 10 websites in the world amongst 12-17 year olds are almost exclusively made up services which provide more templates, avatars, bolt-ons, flashboxes, drole content, friends lists, study 'cheat sheets' and quizzes.

Take this now into the arena of the learning environment, personal, virtual or nationally managed, and we see what kind of landscape we might want to start emulating to keep the online school community as alive as the face-to-face one.

How would teachers feel, I wonder, with a VLE where students traded cool add-ons that made their personal page completely different, unrecognisable even from their mates'. Imagine one step further, that the VLE providers, rather than providing content, concentrated instead of providing the electronic equivalent of hammers and nails to empower children to make their own groovy and innovative tools for their own intranet.

Rather than a teacher creating class blogs, and registering all the students one by one, and creating a single feed of their posts, it's the students who are doing this around their friendship or collaborative work groups. Since the content and mechanism are in the hands of the students we see the same exponential growth in content and delivery that we have seen in the real world net, but have really struggled to harness for education. I'd argue that with increased flexibility in the means of delivery we'd also see increased content creation to mould around all these different media.

Many media, not multimedia. New media, not old school.

These, I feel, are the intranets we should be building, not the content-heavy, centrally-controlled, creativity stifling learning management systems that the 90s gave us.
Pic: Pink sherbet

Comments

[Josie Fraser]

Hi Ewan. Just adding my work in this area as an additional resource to this post - the framework I developed is over a year old but comes to the same conclusions: Personalisation within the institution needs to support both customisation and allow students a greater degree of autonomy:
http://fraser.typepad.com/socialtech/2007/05/open_compliment.html

[DK]

Just to add to the discourse - the great one liner from the MTV study:

My mates are my media...

http://mediasnackers.com/report/2007/October/06/477/

[Colin Maxwell]

My college VLE manager would have a fit! Next week I'm getting training on how to upload materials to our college VLE. This is in response to myself and many of my computing colleagues refusing to use the VLE for the past 5 years because we couldn't put material on it ourselves. The concept of users (students) managing their own bit of a VLE would cause our 'stuck in the 20th century' VLE manager to take an apoplexy!

As it happens, having upload rights to the VLE won't make me want to use it either - my students are far more sophisticated, using blogs, wikis, chatrooms, web conferencing on a daily basis - they see the VLE as a rigid, restrictive environment akin to the school classrooms of yesteryear.

Bring back chalk and blackboards I hear them say! NOT!

[Ian Stuart]

Colin,
Its down to FUD - Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. Its a sales technique well known in industry. IT professionals are amongst the biggest FUD merchants about the place.
IT 'experts' are the new Plumbers(another area famous for FUD). They suck through their teeth and then say 'ohhh I couldn't let this out of my control. Who knows what might happen!'