As I continue to explore the possibilities provided by the exciting Learnometer project (and I can't wait to see the results of putting these things in students' homes), I am conscious that this is just the start of awesome things to come for radically personalised learning.
A speaker from industry at the Internet of Things Integration Summit Oman that I chaired in Muscat last week said that consumers will readily share their data and engage with service providers when they are offered 'hyper-personalisation'. This resonated with my own experience of learning and the work we are doing in GEMS R&D on new models of education and radical personalisation. The focus is certainly shifting away from the high-residency brick and mortar, fixed curriculum model, to a more flexible 'playlist' of opportunities, always fluid, and adapting to the student's needs and aspirations.
Of course, this has significant implications for the role of teachers in the future. I do believe that we will soon be seeing the start of a new wave of AI-driven 'Personal Learning Assistants' or 'Concierges' (PLCs) that will guide students in their personal learning pathways, connecting them with content, teachers, courses, peers, teams, projects, internships and careers. These will probably start as an app on the phone (basic examples already exist in Siri, Cortana and Alexa, and Microsoft are advancing rapidly in this field of Cognitive Services) and It will not be long before we see PLCs possibly in hologrammatic form, projected from a wearable on demand and swiped away when no longer needed. The key skill then will be knowing when to summon the Concierge and what to ask - or whether to take the advice you receive (as this may be offered without you asking!)
We may laugh at the somewhat creepy Barbie hologram, but I think we'll look back one day and see it as part of a revolution in personalised learning.
We've come a long way since the Microsoft Word Paper Clip...
