Independent Learning

I’ve been having fun embarking on a new research project this semester. This requires a lot of reading and hunting down the appropriate resources. Sometimes I’m looking for a brief introductory overview of a particular concept or approach; at other times I’m looking for a specific application or methodology. Finding the right materials at the right level, so I can get the most out of it, can be challenging. While the process is occasionally frustrating, I do enjoy the scent and the hunt to learn something new. I’m also reasonably efficient and well-practiced in separating the wheat from the chaff in the Internet era.

How do novice students try to learn something new? Before the internet, you might go to the library and look for (what you hope is) the appropriate book or encyclopedia. Or you might try to find an expert in the area – this could be a teacher/professor or some other practitioner. You are likely to trust the library book or the area expert. Information is scarce, and for it to get into an encyclopedia or an expert’s brain-schema, it is likely significant resources were expended to do so. The information is probably of ‘good’ quality because it has been filtered by the appropriate gatekeepers.

In the Wild Wild Web (WWW) of information abundance, the problem is wading through the chaff to get to the needle in the haystack. How does one filter through that information? With modern search engines, an Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) bot sorts or ranks the information according to some algorithm. And if you so happened to find what you wanted, the ‘helpful’ bot might even suggest or recommend what you might look into next. For example, “folks like you who read X also read Y.” The algorithm is based on some assumptions, and further interactions between the user and the algorithm refines it – for better or for worse. Algorithms can also be ‘gamed’ by users.

All this made me think about the push towards online ‘personalized’ learning. I’ve looked at some of these adaptive-learning systems, which guide a student through learning a particular topic. To find out where the student is at, questions are posed. Based on the students correct or incorrect or half-correct answers, an algorithm ‘decides’ the next item in the sequence that the student should tackle. Presumably this is based on some logical pedagogical system. Maybe we should call this pedalogic. (Hah! I invented another new word.) The system filters the student through twists and turns in its database, supposedly to provide the optimum pathway that meets the personalized learning needs of that student. At least that’s what is advertised.

In these adaptive-learning systems, the components of the system have already been vetted, presumably by pedalogical experts (practicing instructors working with educational technologists). While this may pull from WWW, it has been pre-curated by humans. (Post-curation, pathways can be determined by algorithms and user statistics.) Could a similar system work for an independent learner navigating with WWW as an information source? Let’s call it GooglExpert – the adaptive-learning powerful A.I. searchbot. GooglExpert may ask you a few questions during the process to narrow the search scope and collect information to further populate its search database for future users. In this way, it curates the parts of WWW most useful or reliable at the level appropriate to the user. A bunch of data down the road could lead to a lucrative paywalled-garden within the WWW. GooglExpert might even hire expert practitioners to contribute.

If high quality learning requires high quality curation, who or what is best at it? A single novice learner would not be able to separate the wheat from the chaff, but a crowd-sourced group of relative novices might. Would an expert actually be needed? Maybe at some stages. I guess I’m asking myself what relevance I would have to the life of a student in an age where independent learning could take place through GooglExpert Garden. How important is the relationship between humans to the learning process? Maybe it’s different at different learning stages. I could probably teach myself quite a bit of new chemistry, but wouldn’t it be so much richer if I learned it directly from a human expert in the field? Perhaps it’s because I can’t imagine a versatile enough A.I.-bot, but maybe it’s just that I lack imagination.

In the meantime, more exciting independent learning awaits!