There are dangers.

There are also dangers associated with other crap and irrelevant kinds of “education” shoved in so many kids’ faces.

As kids grow older, they need to practice increasing amounts of self-direction. Of course there will be variation between individuals.

Of course most H.S. students will need the collaboration of an experienced and educated adult to create a personalized curriculum. Otherwise, just send the kid to “unschool”.

Thanks for the discussion.

all best,
Greg

Different groups could do the task with the same or isomorphic data sets in different contexts: sports, movies, etc. In reality, they’d probably invent Mean Absolute Deviation, but that would be a good launch for lecture/notes on standard deviation. My guess is ed tech will have us to this point relatively soon, don’t you think?

I do, but I think this is really low-hanging fruit.

Further, the difference between Penny Circle Desmos and Penny Circle Textbook is so much larger than the difference between Penny Circle Desmos and Personalized Circle Desmos. Sure, we can do both. But our finest minds aren’t anywhere close to delivering Personalized Circle Desmos. They’re delivering Personalized Circle Textbook.

I see it as the personalized ad experiences on, for instance, Hulu. Maybe some people love choosing a flavor for their advertising. My guess is that most people would prefer a less lousy viewing experience overall.

Regarding my second point, I’m not suggesting just changing the cover stories for drill problems, though that is better than doing nothing. I’m suggesting having kids do different activities as their intro to a new concept. E.g., introducing standard deviation with an invention task asking kids to come up with a measure of dispersion for given data sets. Different groups could do the task with the same or isomorphic data sets in different contexts: sports, movies, etc. In reality, they’d probably invent Mean Absolute Deviation, but that would be a good launch for lecture/notes on standard deviation. My guess is ed tech will have us to this point relatively soon, don’t you think? Even Penny Circle on Desmos could be personalized, I would say. Just put the circle and the filling-in of it in some personalized context (decorating a circular cake with m&m’s, etc). I know you dislike just changing the cover story and saying you’ve improved a task, but I think if you can personalize the context to feel to students like it’s responsive to their interests, that would be a qualitative improvement.

A sidebar here — I think it’s a mistake to aim toward teaching kids to think and talk like biologists physicists or whatevers. Lets just try to get them to think in ways that they can apply no matter what they are doing.

Interesting sidebar. While argument and critique (for example) are skills that transcend context, I have a hard time seeing how teachers are supposed to decontextualize them. Who teaches these generalized skills? Also, there are lots of ways to contextualize those skills without asking students to perform them at a graduate or post-graduate level. Why do two even numbers always add up to an even number? Argue about it! That’s the epistemology of a mathematician, accessible at the fifth grade level.

@Kevin, a lot of fun learning is possible with adaptive learning software. That doesn’t contradict my point that the software circumscribes a lot of other fun learning possibilities. Which is, as you rightly call out, a value judgment on my part. I’ve never claimed otherwise.

Kevin:

Don’t you think ed tech is the most likely way to do this? We could each study the same topic in different contexts, varying by our interests (sports, science, video games, etc).

I’m actually enormously cynical about the success of this approach, a few research citations notwithstanding.

The number of [ ipads / points / party guests ] increases with time according to the function f(t) = 2t + 4. How many of [ ipads / points / party guests ] were there after four hours?

It’s easy personalization but, for me, pretty depressing.

If I ask students to select their content preference in advance, sure, maybe over a few problems students will be more interested in the problems and that interest may even translate into higher achievement.

But how sustainable is that strategy? What returns will it pay us over a year? We’re applying different shades of lipstick but it’s the same pig. The problem is the problem. Not the context around it.