Technology‐mediated personalised learning for younger learners: Concepts, design, methods and practice

Abstract

Children differ in various aspects such as prior knowledge, learning pace, socio-economic status, interests etc. It has been argued that when we take these differences into account when we develop learning environments, children will benefit from it in terms of learning outcomes, learning experience, and attitudes towards particular subjects. The emergence of digital technologies has accelerated the movement to create personalised learning environments. Although technology-mediated personalised learning is promising, several challenges remain such as how personalised learning should be conceptualized, which methods should be used to establish the effects and how this movement impacts education and especially children and teachers. This workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners who have done work in this field to facilitate in-depth discussions, resource exchange and networking on technologymediated personalised learning.

Agency in Educational Technology: Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Implications for Learning Design

“…Connecting to Giddens' (1984) work, Redmond (2009) defines agency as the "capacity to act" (p. 544) and describes it in terms of the choices available to young children and children's awareness about these choices. The social justice discourse in education argues that educational environments, including digital environments, need to be designed in ways to socially empower children to make their own choices (Vanbecelaere et al, 2020) and to ensure that all children, regardless of background or predispositions, can actively participate in meaning making, literacy, and learning activities (Hempel-Jorgensen, 2015). Learning environments that disregard children's active participation negatively impact their development (Berthelsen, & Brownlee, 2005) and deficit discourses that position children as lacking certain capabilities, including agency, disregard the collective forces that shape the opportunities available to children to express their individuality and particularness (e.g., Mary & Young, 2018;Carela, 2019).…”

BJET editorial 2022

“…The special sections in Issues 5 and 6 bring attention to younger learners, and the role of the digital. Issue 5 engages with key challenges that sit around technology-mediated personalised learning (Vanbecelaere & Benton, 2021), in terms of design, evaluation and impact on pedagogical practice. Issue 6 centres around digitalisation in early childhood (Pölzl-Stefanec et al, 2021), bringing critical discussions that explore the use and impact of digital media in early childhood.…”