Looking generally at the apps and tools that have been highlighted by the group research, I see there is a vast range covered. I appreciate the technical finesse of the forms and graphs employed here, and I commend the spirit of experimentation, but I also wonder if these resulting graphs are ultimately so accurate or useful. I’m going to comment, rather, on the research more generally.
There are some useful extensions and tools here that I can see being quite useful, offering prompts and automated short-cuts that – if they prove reliable and user-friendly – are likely already quite successful. Several of these apps are geared towards younger learners — several in the OER specifically addressed the psychomotor process of learning to draw the letters — which I also see as useful and I think has already met with success in the market.
Then there are apps like Evernote which are trying to help us organize ourselves, which technically might fall within the definition of personalized learning, but for me this also begins to break down the category. The personalized computer (PC) is clearly a personalized learning tool, which would then seem to expand this category beyond any meaningful utility.
The whole tech world, on the other hand, seems to be rapidly moving towards this idea of personalization. Aspects of these tools might get incorporated into the larger tools like Google and become core to the user experience in the near future. I am still puzzling over Knewton which seems to have giant ambitions that, if successful, could radically change education as we know it. But I also cling to the thought that personality is an essential human quality and I somehow hope that we will be able to collectively shrug off this oxymoronic trend towards monopolistic personalization.
