the church as a body, not least in flexibility and breadth of coverage, and the sense of control and purpose it can provide for the individual learner. However a potential barrier may be with adult learners whose only experience of education was as a schoolchild. Such individuals may feel overwhelmed at the prospect of taking on responsibility for their own lifelong learning, and may therefore become disengaged from any ongoing learning.
Personalised learning in no way implies its individualisation. Personalisation refers to the centrality of the learner in the process of learning and decisions about it, not to any particular learning context or methodology. Thus while a learner may create an individual learning diary or an individual portfolio of learning, the learning itself could quite easily occur in a communal context (e.g. adult evening class, church home group).
6.3 Individual Learners and Isolation
All learning is individual in the long run, for in whatever circumstances information is received and experiences occur, they have to be processed by the individuals themselves. And it is individuals who subsequently grow and change, although this clearly then influences the growth and development of communities. As discussed earlier, individuals may be very different in how they learn best, and such individuality can be accommodated and greatly affirmed through personalised learning pathways. Failing to recognise the importance of the individual may contribute to their overall disempowerment in learning.
Yet there are circumstances where an individual’s approach to learning may lead to their isolation. A trend towards personalised learning has the potential to isolate the individual learner [66], e.g. by minimising interaction with other learners. The same could be said for the rise of ICT-related learning [67], e.g. working alone with a home computer.
Such isolation may be detrimental to the learner as it is widely recognised that learning, especially in informal contexts, is reinforced by interaction with others [68]. This is equally true for informal learning in a church setting, where it “is something which people do for and with each other ... (and) the best learning, especially in the case of adults, is almost always in groups.” [69] It is possible that the two trends in learning discussed above may have a negative impact on informal learning if they encourage individualisation. This is where learners become or remain isolated from some sort of learning community, and especially when their learning is not honed by interaction with others or put into practice.
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