 We're talking about lives. We're talking about minds. We're talking about, ideally, as Randy Bass puts it, the whole person. And the whole person is much more than a set of accessories bolted on to a body. It's about a life lived in space and time with the potential to touch many other lives. Thanks for joining us today, Gardner. It's my pleasure. Appreciate you coming in. How do you define personalized learning? I'd like to tell you a story about personalized learning. I took a creative writing class at Wake Forest University when I was a junior. The creative writing class was taught by a professor I had had three or four times before that. So I was very eager to be in the class with her. Really loved her approach to literature. Was really eager to see what she'd have to say about writing creatively, not just analyzing the poetry. The first day she came in with a collection of newspaper articles that were going to be prompts we could use for our first writing assignment. One of them had to do with a brain behavior relation story. And I said, I'll take that one. And she smiled. And she said, I thought you might. That's personalized learning because she knew me as a person over time in all the variety, all the ignorance, all the curiosity, all the eagerness that I brought to the learning situation. It was personalized because I counted as a person in the eyes of another person whose expertise would guide me through a new learning experience. The problem with that kind of personalized learning, obviously, is that it doesn't scale. Although it might, we have civilization, we keep trying as human beings to get those personal contexts to pervade our relations with each other. I like to think there might be ways to make those kinds of personal encounters scale, especially if we look at networks not just as tools or information distribution systems, but opportunities for connection. People are trying to make college more accessible, which means more students, which means more overload of faculty. At the same time, budgets are being cut. How do you make these gears grind together? It's a great question. I fully believe it is our obligation to make the experience I've just described as widely available across socioeconomic class, underrepresented groups, as possible. All people deserve that kind of human contact. Many accessibility strategies focus on certain kinds of scaling that, to me, has a cruel irony attached. The irony is what we eventually make available is a very thin version of what it was that we wanted to share. So if 100 people have access to a thin experience, I don't know that that's a great gain over 10 people having access to the real thing. The bottom line for me is we have to figure out a way for 100 people to have access to that thick, rich experience. One of the ways we can do that is to empower the individuals to scale their own meetings on the network. Meeting is kind of a terrible dread word for a lot of us in administration, because it means, as Ken Robinson says, our bodies will take our heads to another place and we will sit there. But there's another way that we can describe meeting. Dietrich Bonhoeffer talks about meeting as one of the spaces in which humans encounter each other in particularly rich and meaningful ways. But to do that, those have to be meetings that emerge from the individual and a desire for connection. It turns out the web was built to facilitate that kind of connection. My question is, is higher ed ready to tap in in very meaningful and deep ways to students' dispositions to connect? Can we guide and grow those dispositions, empower students to be aware of the possibilities of connections in ways that are far beyond complying with requirements and getting a degree? That, it seems to me, scales across multiple individuals. Most importantly, it scales across a life. Well, if we look at the sort of hype that's around personalized learning right now, what do you think that's bubbling up that's new that have people talking about this? Because, personally, learning, I guess, in one form and others, been around since you were a child. It's an excellent point. Personalized learning is one of the things that schools were built to facilitate in the sense that I described earlier, a real sense of connection between the expert learner and the novice learner. Why getting so much interest now, or I guess another way to put it is, why is personalized learning buzzing? I think it's because, and I hate to say this, but I really do have a strong suspicion, we are now learning how to work with personally generated information at scale in ways that lead us to believe that we can use the information or the data people produce to design personalization for them. And then we get into a weird metaphor, which is we can fit your feet exactly because we can measure your feet better than ever before. Well, there's value in that, as anybody who wants a nice fitting pair of shoes will testify, but we're not talking about shoes. We're not talking about people and clothing. We're talking about lives. We're talking about minds. We're talking about ideally, as Randy Bass puts it, the whole person. And the whole person is much more than a set of accessories bolted on to a body. It's about a life lived in space and time with the potential to touch many other lives. I wish that latter part was the real energy behind personalized learning as it's buzzing today. I fear that it isn't. I wonder if it's too late to bring the whole person back to the conversation about personalized learning. Maybe it isn't. Maybe there's a way to bring the learners themselves into this conversation in ways that are not just about granular analytics, but about building mindfulness and the disposition towards reflection more deeply, not just into particular classes or an e-portfolio, but into the experience of curriculum itself. I've been working on this very hard at VCU with a number of really great colleagues. It's a challenge. People really do shape curriculum in ways that they believe will conduce to the education of the whole person. But given the way schools are put together and the way we've managed certain kinds of scaling, curriculum ends up being stacked like bricks, pieced together like Legos. And students treat it as just a stack of stuff because that's the signal we send. Can we think about personalized learning with regard to curriculum as a support for those learner-initiated connections? That's a very interesting question. I think it plays in very well with what Randy Bass talks about when he describes the digital ecosystem. It's not just the world we live in as the world we help to make. How do we bring that knowledge to students over the course of a curriculum, over the course of a degree? That's an interesting question. Analytics, great, useful tool, bad word. Well, again, it depends on what we're talking about. Student success and personalized learning. Golly. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. You know, one of my most charming qualities is that I will rise to any bait. It really doesn't matter. I don't care what the lure is. I don't care what it's on the hook. It's like, oh, bait. Brian Alexander will tell you that as well. So, let's see. Analytics, certainly we want to be able to generate meaningful data and data are not meaningful on their own. So that's the first thing I wanna say. But we wanna be able to generate meaningful data to help us understand things in ways that will enhance our ability to predict, enhance our ability to meet needs. We've learned this from cellular biology. You can look at my arm and never figure out what's wrong, but if you have an X-ray machine or you have a theory of cells or germs, these are very useful tools. They're analytics. But what about analytics with regard to the whole person idea of human learning? Randy Bass to use him, I just came from Randy Bass's plenary. It was incredibly inspiring. So I've got Randy Bass on the brain, which is a nice thing. I like that. I like it when he lives in there for a while. Randy Bass a couple of years ago talked about this idea he called slow analytics. And I don't think he's really built that idea out a lot, although it's implicit in some of his work now. But the idea was like the slow food movement where we weren't just trying to get it over with, analytics would similarly have a useful extension through time that would help us understand not just what the signals were in a particular course or even a particular degree program. But I think what he meant, you can ask him, raised the learner into an awareness of the analytics they can imagine and perform for themselves. Now learning theorists have had a word for this for a long time, they call it meta cognition, thinking about thinking. If there are analytics and analytical frameworks that can help the institution meet the needs of students, but also help them meet the greatest need of all, which is for students to have a more sophisticated understanding of their own needs and identities as learners. I'm on board with that, I think that's great. And I think we can empower students to continue to track their own learning throughout their lives. Recognizing opportunities not just to find a job but make a job. Recognize opportunities not just to be shaped by culture but an opportunity indeed an obligation to help shape and build culture themselves as agents, as empowered learners. If what we do in our institutions build out in our own practices and empower our students as a result of those practices to shape meaningful analytics for themselves, for their entire lives, I think that would be great. I have to be honest that most of the talk about analytics right now doesn't seem to rise to that level of aspiration. And I think the danger is bricks are useful, but if that's the metaphor with which you build your world, you may not end up with anything but a pile of bricks. I also wanna stress that there is an ethical obligation that we have to students to help them understand what data we collect, why we collect it and that in the end, it's their data. They need to make informed decisions about how and when to share that. Not just in the context of FERPA, let's not share anything, we'll take care of that. Don't worry, you're pretty little head students. We have protected you. As Michael Feldstein pointed out in his recent article in the Chronicle, students should understand the benefits of sharing data about their learning and how that story can be told in ways that will benefit them beyond any single course or degree program. We have this thing at VCU we talk about that's called generalizable education. Education with impact beyond any single course or degree program or major. And the idea is you will have this experience, it will help you shape the shaping for the rest of your life. Analytics, the generation of data around activity certainly has some part to play in that, but not in a custodial arrangement on behalf of the institution, especially not on behalf of the institutions claims towards prestige, but instead as a way to help students understand how we're trying to understand them. So that can lift them into a higher sphere of self understanding. There's a mindfulness you have, there's a society you see in your head that 90% of the population doesn't have time to think about, doesn't have time to envision, doesn't even have time to participate in. They're busy eating at McDonald's while you're busy trying to make slow food. And that's got to be a frustrating place to be. The things that you talk about in terms of envisioning the whole student as a mind that's more than a set of bricks for courses, you've got a big wave against you because accessibility to education is not looked at that way. It's how can we piecemeal it out to as many people as possible so they can check that box and say, I have a college degree. What do you do with that kind of frustration? I struggle with a good way to describe the struggle. So as is always the case, I'm always going for the meta thing. It is a necessary set of ideals, principles, mindfulness, I think, to advocate for. These are ideas and principles and the kind of mindfulness that I try to practice not because I thought it up, but because a great cloud of witnesses throughout my life, including most emphatically my own best teachers, showed me what that would be like. I am the product of educators who care deeply about the kinds of things I try to talk about and live. And in many instances, those beloved professors found ways to do this despite enormous odds, having to do with their own sexuality or their gender when women weren't in the academy in great numbers or the unpopular opinions that they would espouse or their stubbornness in their English department meetings. People kept the faith for decades preparing for the moment in which I would be able to be empowered and enlivened by their presence. I am sure they got frustrated just the way I get frustrated. I am sure that they had days in which they thought, you know, maybe I just go need to find an honest way to make a living because this just doesn't seem to be it, but they kept the faith. And I feel like if I didn't keep trying in my own ways to do that, I would have betrayed the gift they gave me. I may not do it the right way all the time. Probably I don't. I may not do it with the success that they had. But these are not principles I made up. They are not idiosyncratic. They may be difficult ones to think about at scale. Good, that's a challenge. Let's get going. We're human beings. We eat problems for breakfast. Let's go. They may be difficult to fold in to the busy administration of a very large university. Okay, I get that. Lots of tasks, we'll get them done. But task number one is, how do we look at the people who empowered us to be here today and keep that standard aloft? Keep that flag waving. Do something honest and heartfelt and smart to honor what they gave us as we got here. And then in turn, make that more available to more people across all social lines for the future. That's the future I want to build. Do I get frustrated? Absolutely. Absolutely I get frustrated. I get frustrated when people talk about this stuff as, oh, that's the 30,000 foot level. What are we going to do about this, that and the other thing? I get frustrated for two reasons. I don't think it's the 30,000 foot level. I think it's the foundation on which we build. But I'll be honest, I also get frustrated because I understand how complex it is. And I understand that a lot of people of goodwill are really trying to build a better higher education for the future and for more people. And I get frustrated because of the enormity of the task. I just feel overwhelmed. And I know that others around me do too. But when I see great colleagues doing amazing work that inspires me, I feel like, well, you know, in the grand scheme of things, I won't quote Casablanca right, but the problems of my little world don't amount to a hill of beans in terms of what it is that we're trying to build together. And I feel that in my work, I want to honor and support those whose work has been so vital for me. But I'll end that with another little story. A story about one of the things that really keeps me going. Monday night, about 36 hours ago, I guess or so, I was in a room with 24 young learners who had gathered together to take a course called Milton. I'm the instructor for that course. Milton is my disciplinary specialty. We sat in that room together. I asked them, all right, it's May. What's the happy ending? What is it that you hope will have happened as a result of this experience? A couple of them spoke of grades. Most of them did not. Most of them had within them an idealism and a hope and a courage for what they wanted to do that far outstripped this idea of bricks or Legos laid end to end. That's what keeps me going. That's why I, you know, never give up, never surrender because there is still hope most conspicuously in those learners that this will be something greater than the sum of its parts. In a Milton class. All right.