From the Inside Flap
At its heart, learning has been and always will be a personal experience. The term personalizing learning has been increasingly used by policy makers, educational theorists and practitioners alike but one of the criticisms of it is that it means different things to different people. If it is to have lasting significance, it must unite the strands of thinking to help learners and their teachers achieve new levels of attainment.
Personalizing Learning in the 21st Century brings together contributions from a wide range of educationalists interested in the idea of personalizing learning. Although the book is intended primarily for teachers and policy makers, it will be of interest to many others, in health education, consultancy, management, research and development, and industrial training. Reading this book should be a personalized learning experience for each and every one of us.
About the Author
Dr Sara de Freitas is a Research Fellow in ICT and Education at the London Knowledge Lab - a collaborative venture between Birkbeck College and the Institute of Education, University of London, exploring the future of learning with digital technologies. Sara is also a consultant with the UK Joint Information Systems Committee e-Learning Development Programme in the Innovation strand, exploring the applications of innovative technologies on post-16 learning. She also founded and co-chairs the UK Lab Group, which brings the research and development community together to create stronger links between industrial and academic research. Sara is widely published in a number of areas including pedagogy and e-learning. Dr Chris Yapp is Head of Public Sector Innovation at Microsoft. Chris has worked in the IT industry for 25 years in a variety of roles. His long-term interests have been in Networking and Education and he has specialized in the areas of lifelong learning, e-government, the creative industries and social exclusion in the emerging knowledge society. He is a frequent public speaker on strategic issues around IT and has been a member of a number of Government Advisory Groups. He is an Associate of the Think Tank DEMOS, a Trustee of the educational charity MirandaNet and a Patron of the National Association for Able Children in Education, NACE.