Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ Second Draft: A Continuum of Personalized Learning

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

This is one of those articles where a diagram would have helped a lot. Well, mostly because it would have shown how the idea of a 'continuum' here is incoherent. But still. Here's Larry Cuban's description of the continuum: "At one end of the continuum are teacher-centered lessons within the traditional age-graded school.... At the other end of the continuum are student-centered classrooms, programs, and schools." OK, so what's in between? Cuban clusters questions concerning the 'how' of personalized learning with the teacher-centered lessons. He positions the 'what' with the student-centred classrooms. There's nothing where students aren't in classrooms, there's no sense where the 'what' might be found in teacher-centered lessons, and when we start talking about competencies and modalities it becomes apparent that we have a jigsaw puzzle, not a continuum. You create a continuum when there's only one variable that changes; when you have multiple variables you build a matrix or a graph.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Dec 22, 2024 9:16 p.m.

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