{"id":746,"date":"2014-05-14T16:13:16","date_gmt":"2014-05-14T21:13:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/?p=746"},"modified":"2018-07-19T14:16:10","modified_gmt":"2018-07-19T19:16:10","slug":"personalized-e-learning-styles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/2014\/05\/14\/personalized-e-learning-styles\/","title":{"rendered":"Personalized e-Learning Styles"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Although a bit of a stretch, this post was inspired by the following blog post, which talks about <a href=\"http:\/\/thinkstitcher.com\/tag\/dunn-and-dunn\/\">the Facebook API in terms of learning styles.<\/a> If you&#8217;re interested in such things, you are probably also aware of <a href=\"http:\/\/tincanapi.com\/learning-record-store\/\">learning record stores and things like the Tin Can AP<\/a>I.\u00a0 You need these things if you&#8217;re supporting e-learning across devices, for example&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Really, though, I was looking for information like the following nice rendering from Andrew Chua:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/andrewchua.com\/?page_id=22\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone\" title=\"Learning Styles\" src=\"http:\/\/andrewchua.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/learningpreferences.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"709\" height=\"399\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a lot of hype in e-learning about what it means to &#8220;personalize&#8221; learning.\u00a0 You hear people say that their engagements (or recommendations for same) take into account individuals&#8217; learning styles.\u00a0 Well&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>There are various models of how people learn differently or what can affect learning that are somewhat conflated in the notion of &#8220;learning styles&#8221;.\u00a0 There are various models of how people differ with regard to their style of learning including:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Myers-Briggs<\/li>\n<li>Gresha-Reichman<\/li>\n<li>Felder-Silverman<\/li>\n<li>Kolb<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Here&#8217;s a great background paper on these and another discussed below:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<div id=\"gs_cit0\">Coffield, Frank, et al. &#8220;Learning styles and pedagogy in post-16 learning: A systematic and critical review.&#8221; (2004).<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Among the various dimensions of these models are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> social aspects, like how cooperative or competitive one tends to be<\/li>\n<li>whether one tends to learn independently or depending on an instructor\n<ul>\n<li>whether one is more or less introverted or extroverted<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>how well one learns visually versus aurally (or verbally, such as in reading vs. listening or speaking)<\/li>\n<li>notions of how one perceives or processes concretely or abstractly, actively or reflectively, intuitively or &#8230;<\/li>\n<li>whether one makes decisions or judgements deliberatively or intuitively<\/li>\n<li>whether one comprehends in a sequential or bottom-up versus global or top-down manner<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In the context of social e-learning, some of these are clearly useful.\u00a0 In the context of deciding what problems to recommend or where in a textbook or on the web to direct a learner, the jury is out.\u00a0 For details, see the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Learning_styles#Criticism\">excellent critical comments on Wikipedia<\/a>, including:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Despite a large and evolving research programme, forceful claims made  for impact are questionable because of limitations in many of the  supporting studies and the lack of independent research on the model.<\/li>\n<li>At present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating  learning styles assessments into general educational practice.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So we have to be careful buying the hype that learning styles will move the accelerometer needle when it comes to e-learning.\u00a0\u00a0 But there&#8217;s another model of learning styles that is more interesting:\u00a0 Dunn &amp; Dunn.<\/p>\n<p>Dunn &amp; Dunn have done an excellent job of providing a framework that is ready for use in e-learning.\u00a0 Some of the other models give us hints about how to characterize and distinguish learners by personality or cognitive traits.\u00a0 Dunn &amp; Dunn gives more on what can affect learning without being as concerned with personality.\u00a0 At least that&#8217;s what I see and like about the framework.<\/p>\n<p>There is a lot of information that could be available for personalizing learning beyond the &#8220;knowledge state&#8221; that was introduced by the folks behind ALEKS (now part of McGraw-Hill).\u00a0 The idea of a &#8220;knowledge state&#8221; is, essentially, a cluster in an n-dimensional state of mastery where each dimension denotes a level of mastery of some learning objective or concept.\u00a0 Personalizing learning by recommending what maximizes improvement for people in such a cluster is the guts of the big-data approach to adaptive educational technology.\u00a0 Learning styles are an after thought, for the most part, and far less efficacious, at least given the criticism discussed above.<\/p>\n<p>But&#8230; ignoring the kinds of information that Dunn &amp; Dunn have mapped out is just plain dumb.\u00a0 But, without fixating on Dunn &amp; Dunn per se, let&#8217;s just consider information that could improve an e-learning offering:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>facial orientation &#8211; the laptops, tablets and smartphones on which e-learning software runs can see your face, recognize you, and tell when you are facing the device.\u00a0 If you&#8217;re constantly looking away, your learning will probably be correlated.<\/li>\n<li>eye movement &#8211; my smartphone scrolls depending on where I look.\u00a0 If I&#8217;m staring at the same spot on the screen, I might be tired or daydreaming.\u00a0 Recommending text at a high reading level might not be a good idea right now.<\/li>\n<li>saccades &#8211; if you&#8217;re eye is moving around while your face is pointed at the screen, you&#8217;re engaged!\n<ol>\n<li>when people talk about saccades they&#8217;re generally talking about rapid eye movements, but the term can refer to other rapid body movements, which an accelerometer can pick up if it isn&#8217;t sitting on a desk.<\/li>\n<li>if you jump, it might be worth knowing that you might have been distracted, or if you&#8217;re foot is twitching while you&#8217;re reading on your tablet or smartphone, should the e-learning system take that into consideration?<\/li>\n<li>you could also view information from touch sensors as providing saccade information (aside from user interface activity, such as clicking, dragging, scrolling, or scaling)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n<li>blinking &#8211; if you&#8217;re not doing it you&#8217;re either thinking hard or tired or hungry or&#8230;\u00a0\u00a0 if you are blinking a lot, you&#8217;re probably thinking and perhaps challenged (i.e., stumped or confused)<\/li>\n<li>posture &#8211; if you&#8217;re tablet&#8217;s in your lap or your hands, the accelerometer and gravitational sensors can give useful information\n<ol>\n<li>listening to a lecture while you&#8217;re walking is better than recommending a journal article<\/li>\n<li>are you lying on the floor, sitting at a desk, or reclining on a sofa?\u00a0 Do you learn better from different types of resources in those circumstances?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n<li>location &#8211; are you in class, at the library, or at home?\n<ol>\n<li>Maybe it doesn&#8217;t matter which, but we can cluster sensor data into modes of engagement and learn how to teach you better.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n<li>time of day is missing from other learning style models;\u00a0 Dunn &amp; Dunn have it\n<ol>\n<li>media might be a better recommendation when there&#8217;s a little motion while your reclining in the evening.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n<li>ambient light and noise information can indicate that media may or may not be preferable at the moment\n<ol>\n<li>what if the noise is mostly one or two voices?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n<li>temperature, humidity, and pressure are available in many cases&#8230;<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>A lot of this is distinguishing learning style from mode of engagement.\u00a0 Mode of engagement matters, perhaps more than personality-based learning styles.\u00a0 And it can distinguish a good mobile e-learning solution from a dumb one.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;re working on a service-oriented architecture that takes this kind of information in to a learning record store.\u00a0 Tabtor has been one recent inspiration.\u00a0 Their use of digital paper is great.\u00a0 Other great ideas are more than welcome!<\/p>\n<p><object classid=\"clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" codebase=\"http:\/\/download.macromedia.com\/pub\/shockwave\/cabs\/flash\/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0\"><param name=\"allowFullScreen\" value=\"true\" \/><param name=\"allowscriptaccess\" value=\"always\" \/><param name=\"src\" value=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/RCuGif9lbLg?hl=en_US&amp;version=3\" \/><param name=\"allowfullscreen\" value=\"true\" \/><embed type=\"application\/x-shockwave-flash\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/RCuGif9lbLg?hl=en_US&amp;version=3\" allowscriptaccess=\"always\" allowfullscreen=\"true\"\/><\/object><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Although a bit of a stretch, this post was inspired by the following blog post, which talks about the Facebook API in terms of learning styles. If you&#8217;re interested in such things, you are probably also aware of learning record stores and things like the Tin Can API.\u00a0 You need these things if you&#8217;re supporting &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/2014\/05\/14\/personalized-e-learning-styles\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Personalized e-Learning Styles&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[535],"tags":[583,653,536,897,669,666,664,665,646,668,667],"class_list":["post-746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-educational-technology","tag-adaptive-learning","tag-aleks","tag-e-learning","tag-educational-technology","tag-knowledge-state","tag-learning-record-store","tag-learning-styles","tag-mobile-learning","tag-personalized-learning","tag-tabtor","tag-tin-can-api"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=746"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1529,"href":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746\/revisions\/1529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}