The Shape of Things to Come: Personalisation and Collaboration in Education

In this keynote address, Charles will discuss:

• What is personalised learning? From theory to practice
• What does personalisation mean for collaboration?
• Future models of learning.

The key messages that will come across from this keynote address will include: Personalised learning is not a utopian concept. Rather it can be done in practice. It solves problems rather than being ideological and it is not about viewing young people as consumers. The aim of personalised learning should be to turn young people and parents into investors in learning, providing choice and voice as a route to motivation and commitment. Young children should therefore be regarded as the great untapped resource of the learning system.

He will further argue that the building blocks of schools can become obstacles and therefore schools cannot act alone but need to collaborate. The discussion will also consider why collaboration needs to begin with pre-school and also includes external school influences.

Charles will also speculate about the future of learning asking pertinent questions such as:

• What if the curriculum changed each month, tailored to different places and people?
• What if education were organised like computer games? Or eBay?
• What if there was mass peer-to-peer, self-organised learning?
• And if it does look like this, what does it take to lead that?

Finally, he will identify some of the key challenges for Scotland in the context of Curriculum for Excellence and Glow.

Charles Leadbeater

Charles Leadbeater is a leading authority on innovation and creativity. He has advised companies, cities and governments around the world on innovation strategy and drawn on that experience in writing his latest book We-think: the power of mass creativity, which charts the rise of mass, participative approaches to innovation from science and open source software, to computer games and political campaigning.