Higher Personalisation
by Duncan O'Leary
Charlie Leadbeater continues his personalisation Odyssey with an article in The Times Higher Education Supplement today. Unfortunately open access hasn't penetrated the paper yet, but here's a taster:
'The 1990s model of customer-driven higher education is the high-throughput university, offering standardised, just-in-time degrees. Shopping for a degree is rather like shopping for white goods in the basement of John Lewis.
Yet the generation going into university have grown up with quite different organisational models: Napster and Kazaar, E Bay and SMS messaging, large, peer-to-peer, self organising communities, in which the 'consumers' of services are simultaneously their producers."
Drawing on the ideas of Personalisation through Participation, the article suggests that greater participation and self-organisation are necessary in order to ensure that higher education avoids the pitfalls of standardised, impersonal learning.