Of course, personalization is not the only term that has been corrupted in the new era of automated learning and the marcomm that goes with it. Interactive, for example, no longer means two or more people interacting with one another. Instead, interactive refers to a student taking a quiz online, "interacting" with the course content. The student clicks the answers to a quiz and then gets the score back from the computer: presto! That's interactive learning online.
Or take the term "immersive," a term that was once used to refer to language learning that happened totally in the context of the target language. If you learned Turkish by going to live in Ankara, that would be immersive learning. Role-playing games can also offer immersive experiences, so a program like Reacting to the Past (I am a fan!) can make a good claim for being immersive. But in marcomm Newspeak, anything online is now "immersive" as you can see here: Online Courses and Marketing Fluff: What is an immersive history course?
So, I already knew that personalized, interactive, and immersive were lost causes as vocabulary goes, but what I learned from the Twitter conversation last week is that even the term agency has been co-opted, and that really surprised me... not in a good way. As I see it, machine-driven learning is the exact opposite of learner agency, but the proponent of machine-driven learning in the Twitter convo (Donald Clark) insisted that there are lots of great examples of machine-driven learning which are based on learner agency. I asked for specifics. He told me to look at CogBooks (only later did I find out he is an adviser to the company). So, I looked at CogBooks ... and that's where I saw, for the first time I think, the appropriation of the term agency for something that is anything-but-agency; here's a screenshot:
If I understand the information here correctly, "student agency" now means the following: the student self-scores their learning on a scale of 0 to 100 (of course! there must be a percentage), and if you rate yourself poorly (below the sacred number 70? I'm not sure), then the computer will give you one item to read/watch, plus two more that you can choose from. More content, of course, must be what this student wants. Or, at least, you better hope that is what the student wants, because that's all the courseware apparently has on offer.
And that's... student agency.
In response, then, to what seems to be a poor understanding of the term "agency," I will offer two readings and a graphic to deepen that understanding:
Tech, Agency, Voice (On Not Teaching) by Chris Friend. quote: Paulo Freire talks of “problem-posing education,” in which learners identify and/or construct the problems they see as pressing and worthy of attention or study. They don’t respond to the questions asked of them by teachers; they create the questions and ask them of world. In problem-posing education, learning becomes real, essential—I dare say life-giving. Learners are compelled to seek answers because they want to know. Not because it’s been assigned. Not because they’re submitting. This is the heart of liberatory education — and should be our goal when using technology in classes: Get students learning on their own terms, following their own interests, seeking their own satisfaction.
Trust, Agency, and Connected Learning by Jesse Stommel. quote: Very little about what happens in a classroom should be fixed in advance. And I mean fixed chairs, inflexible reading lists, predetermined outcomes, and assignments with rules not designed for breaking. It is good to offer guidance and also protections for difference. But, for me, the best outcome for a learning experience is something I never could have anticipated in advance. Trajectories can be mapped, but never at the expense of epiphanies.
Connected Learning from the Connected Learning Research Network and Digital Media & Learning Research Hub. quote: Connected learning prizes the learning that comes from actively producing, creating, experimenting, and designing, because it promotes skills and dispositions for lifelong learning, and for making meaningful contributions to today's rapidly changing work and social conditions.
The click-this-or-that claim to agency at CogBooks is the opposite of the open-ended, learner-driven freedom that you can read about in these articles and in the connected learning graphic.
Interestingly, when I looked up a review of CogBooks courseware at EdSurge, I found that CogBooks courseware was rated very low on learner autonomy using EdSurge's Courseware in Context (CWiC) Framework.
I then looked online to learn more about the framework:
So, as usual, despite the very frustrating Twitter conversation, I did manage to learn something new while poking around afterwards. I had not seen this CWiC framework before (no surprise, as I am not a user of courseware and not interested in using it). What CWiC looks at for learner autonomy still falls short of what I aspire to in my classes, but at least it is a component in the overall rating. Here are the questions CWiC asks about learner autonomy:
Admittedly, the phrase they are using here is "learner autonomy," not agency. So maybe if the word "agency" has indeed been co-opted by the forces of marcomm now, we can still hang on a little longer to the word autonomy before it also becomes part of the marketing campaign for machine-driven learning.
And hey: no worries! Those of us who have been teaching online successfully for years and years have apparently never gotten it right before, but finally, CogBooks offers online learning that really works. Everything is double-plus-good, as you can see:
