Learning using a mobile device, including smartphones and tablets, can involve an app. An app is short for an application that is downloaded to a device. Apps can be utilized for many purposes, including educational ones. By using an app, education can be personalized to a learner in multiple ways. Personalization means that the app helps to tailor the learning experience to specific needs of that individual. It is this topic that I’ve investigated throughout this course as an individual research topic and as a perspective that I brought to a team experience to critique a course within an educational app.

To summarize my blog posts and comments to date, I’d like to use an analogy that relates to people that may be unfamiliar with this topic to tie together my learnings so far. In addition to education, another purpose for apps is to organize and listen to music on your smartphone. Right now, I am trying to determine which music app to commit to as I’ve been doing most of my listening in Google music. As much as I don’t love the fact that Google is learning more about me with every ‘thumbs-down’ or ‘thumbs-up’ I press on music I listen to within the app, I know that every time I do this that I am giving the app information about my individual music preferences. In giving the app this data and information, I assume that the app will respond by being better able to personalize the music that it will choose for me to hear going forward. It also allows it to better develop the method it personalizes as I am contributing to the app data that it uses to develop the method it personalizes called an algorithm. As a result, from this known data exchange with the app, I can work for a longer period of time without having to press skip. It also allows the music service to provide a great benefit to me as the listener: it saves my time to compile playlists, find artists I like and other functions. This anecdote leads into a summary of my findings so far in my blog posts and comments with related examples to this music app analogy:

  1. Part of personalization in learning can be making abundant content more easily searchable for the learner and then once found, also easily organizable for them. Increased personalization would give them the option of organizational style to use that they understand and enjoy using. For example, in Google Play music, I can choose between playing an individual song, a radio station or a station that will play music like my choice of song. I prefer this to having to less personalized apps where I must choose a word that describes my mood (i.e.. happy, sad, upset). In this way, personalization can decrease the overwhelm of abundant content by making the content work to benefit the learner based on what their individual needs are from the information.
  1. Personalization may only take us so far, there may need to be a social aspect to the learning to ensure a learner’s needs are accommodated. This Master’s program is an excellent example of where other people’s perspectives add to your learning as we all bringing our unique knowledge, experiences and I think that interacting with others and using them to help us learning can be one of the most time-consuming and challenging aspect of learning, but potentially the most-rewarding. I think challenging because it can be a challenge to empathize with others and understand where they are coming from, because our brain understands a concept differently than another (based on constructivism theory). In this course, I’ve observed this phenomenon with blog posts on similar topics. The posts vary based on the perspective and experience applied to that topic, demonstrating the importance of ensuring the learner is exposed to multiple perspectives and not always learning in an environment that tailors itself only to the unique experience of that learner, to the exclusion of other ideas that could help the learner grow their own mindset. An example that relates to music apps that relays this learning is using Shazam, an app that listens to a song playing, identifies it and can save to your own playlist for later. In many situations, Shazam is used in a social environment to save songs that others may be playing that you would not otherwise come across in your own specific music library tailored for your individual music tastes. In this way, this app provides a social learning experience for me to use that I can save for later for playing in my Google Play music app and that can provide learning for me going forward that I would otherwise not have, if not for the social interaction.
  1. Apps can be developed in many ways and if the learner gives the app permission, it can be built to benefit from other information that the learner has stored in their phone or from other apps on the device. In a similar way, apps can be beneficial in environments that have issues with Wi-Fi due to their ability to function offline, but apps can also be limiting in open learning environments especially when built to personalize to learners as individuals, not a group.