SnowflakeShort

Snowflake effect for learning

At least in the digital world, there is an evolution from scarcity to abundance in many domains. This evolution creates important new opportunities and challenges for (higher) education and strongly influences the expectations of students and, increasingly, of teachers.

In the media in general and music in particular, this trend is clear. The average young person in the 70s had a collection of maybe 20 LP's, which were heard at home. The average young person now has virtually all music ever recorded at her disposal, and can listen to it anywhere and anytime, via an iPod and other devices. She can share her music with friends - legally or not.

Because of this great abundance of material and its availability anytime and anywhere, it is no longer meaningful to deal with music in the traditional way. One can manually manage the music on 20 physical carriers. This approach no longer works with 3,000,000 songs. A first workaround is to provide sophisticated search, so you can create playlists of songs by title, artist, etc. Then the playlist can be played without further intervention by the listener. That is roughly the original model of iTunes. It is also roughly the model of the teacher who searches for relevant learning resources, modifies and packages them and expects the student to work through the material in a more or less controlled way.

But this approach is now passé, because there is too much overhead in searching for music and creating playlists, and because it is often not at all evident to search for music that you do not know. Indeed, users now exchange playlists as well as songs. Newer applications such as last.fm, pandora, finetune, jango and seeqpod follow a different approach: they support personalized recommendations and generate playlists themselves, on the basis of user interactions. The effect is that of a radio station which is specifically tailored to the needs and characteristics of one listener.

It is interesting to note that these applications rely on very different technologies to achieve this effect: last.fm is based on "social recommending", while pandora relies on a very extensive set of metadata developed in the "music genome project".

(Actually, you can now have several radio stations just for yourself - a clear illustration of how technology makes things possible that until recently seemed completely unrealistic. Incidentally, you can also have a television station that transmits only for you, what and when you want ... ☺)

So far, the impact of those developments on education is very limited ... But for example in the use of video materials to illustrate lectures, there is a similar evolution from scarcity to abundance. Until a few years ago, it was very cumbersome for teachers to use such material: typically, a great deal of time had to be spent searching for the appropriate tapes, one had to request weeks in advance the playback equipment in the lecture hall, there were often problems with incompatible formats, etc. Nowadays, it is quite simple to select in the morning on youtube the material to be used the same afternoon in a lecture – the authors speak from personal experience.

Moreover, the move towards "user generated content" (UGC on sites like flickr, slideshare, blogs, wikis, etc.) has caused an explosion of available material. The model of the mass media where the public "consumes" content blurs more and more towards a model of "prosumers" on social media who both consult content and create or modify it in a "rip, mix and burn" way.

In a more educational context, the evolution from scarcity to abundance is further strengthened by the movement to "open educational resources", which are typically offered for reuse under a creative commons license. The early examples of MIT opencourseware and ARIADNE have been picked up around the world, for example in the Open Content Initiative or GLOBE. In this way, already a very large amount of teaching material has become available.

This evolution is also impacting on the notion of “quality”. Where it used to be the case that publishers would ensure the quality of music, publications or educational resources, we are now entering a world where the a posteriori bottom-up personal selection of the user – or often a community of users – replaces the a priori top-down control of the editor. In this sense, LearnRank is eroding the ivory tower of education.

In typical web2.0 applications, the amaterial is unlocked in a very flexible way, so that the abundance does not itself become a problem. For example, the user can typically get an idea about the quality (authority in technorati, star ratings in youtube, number of downloads, etc.) or can subscribe to an RSS feed of dynamically updated query results, so that he will be informed when new material appears that is relevant for him. So far, very few repositories of learning offer these facilities. However, we expect such services to simplify the lives of the average teacher or student in the near future.

In "social networking" applications such as facebook, this evolution is taken one step further: the user can follow what his "friends" are doing and be guided in this way to interesting material, relevant applications or even face-to-face events. Such an approach could certainly prove useful in education, where social networks can facilitate "community based learning": learners can refer one another to relevant resources in much the same way that such resources spread virally on social networking sites. Note that resources in this context include teachers or other learners, as well as applications, besides content!

In the same way that all snowflakes in a snowstorm are unique, each user has her specific characteristics, restrictions and interests. That is why we speak of a "snowflake effect", to indicate that, more and more, the aforementioned facilities will be relied upon to realize far-reaching forms of personalization and "mass customization". This effect will be realized through a hybrid approach with push and pull techniques, in which information is actively requested or searched by the user, but also more and more subtly integrated in his work and learning environment. In this way, a learning environment can be created that is geared to the individual needs of the teacher or student.

What could, for example, a "snowflaked" learning environment look like?

• The teacher will not have to search for learning resources (in google or repositories), but can draw on suggestions that are automatically prepared for him, including, for example:
  • Material that he already used in a similar context;
  • New material that meets queries which he earlier submitted to search engines in a similar context;
  • Material that other teachers with a similar teaching approach have used in a similar context.

• The student will see:
  • the material his fellow students have used and how long they have spent time on it;
  • What questions his colleagues had - including the answers to those questions from other students or teachers;
  • What fellow students are working at the same time with the same material - an excellent step to collaborative learning;
  • What feedback his colleagues have given to the teacher about the quality of the material.

Of course, they can also create ratings, tags and comments, so that a "feedback loop" can be introduced which will help in improving the material and guiding other teachers and students to valuable material.

This snowflake approach can only be developed on an open technical infrastructure for learning. Very important here is the collection of "attention metadata" that captures details of the user interactions. There are obvious questions about privacy and unauthorized use of personal data. But it is highly preferable to actually have that discussion and make possible the use of such data, rather than to continue the current situation where google is probably better informed of what a student does, knows and can than the educational institution that grants the student a diploma!

PS. The reader might ask whether there are also other areas besides music where the "snowflake effect" plays? The author of this piece could elaborate on how this is the case and how it is changing the way we travel, dress ourselves, communicate, eat and drink, fitness, design cars, etc.

PPS. The reader could also ask whether the implications for education will be as drastic as the way in which these technologies have shaken up the music industry. The author of this piece could say that this is probably so, but that formal education can provisionally hide behind the accreditation of diplomas in the probably vain hope that it can skip this cycle of innovation...