FLOE Infrastructure for Individualized Learning

The FLOE Infrastructure for Individualized Learning provides a digital toolkit for learners that supports them in discovering, gathering, and reflecting upon personal data about learning needs and approaches. The goal is to give learners agency over their own data, and to encourage a curiosity-based approach in which it's okay to experiment, gather different kinds of apparently unrelated data, and make tentative and unconventional correlations between their personal data and other data gathered from the world at large—in order to support reflexive, personal, and social modes of data-gathering and sense-making about learning. The infrastructure particularly aims to support those for whom established, formal learning environments may represent a mismatch, and emphasizes opportunities for both private, personal data gathering as well as social reflection with peers, educators/mentors, and family/friends. The asking of questions, rather than coming up with definitive solutions and answers, is the main focal point here. The infrastructure includes:

  • A way to store personal needs and preferences once, and access it anywhere
  • User interface and content personalization tools (e.g. Learner Options)
  • Ways to securely store, own, share, and govern personal data on the web
  • Annotation and narrative data-gathering tools (e.g. Storytelling, data journals, and personal timelines)
  • Pluralistic data-gathering and analysis tools (e.g. Import data from spreadsheets, Nexus-enabled sensors/data loggers, data comparison and merging)
  • Ways to visualize, sonify, and materialize personal data directly alongside learning content
  • Algorithms and approaches that support automated analysis of small, "thick" individualized data sets, and to align them with other data sets within a community or learning circle
  • "Metadata as data" tools that support learning communities in annotating and tagging learning content and relate it to personal learning needs and learning stories

This infrastructure draws upon and weaves together tools and practices we've developed in the UI Options, the Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure, CISL, MyL3, and Project We Count.