Developing personalised education for personal mobile technologies with the pluralisation agenda

Abstract

This paper makes a distinctive contribution to the current debates concerning the role of personal mobile technologies (PMTs) in public education. It does this through drawing attention to the imperative to integrate digitally-mediated personalised education with teacher-mediated pluralised education. Premised on the notion that children’s learning needs to be both tailored to individuals’ aspirations (i.e. personalised) and participatory, entailing the consideration of multiple perspectives (i.e. pluralised), the argument is made that for optimal learning outcomes, both personalisation and plurality need to be integrated when deploying PMTs in schools. Vygotsky’s theory is mobilised to provide a theoretical rationale for emphasising the vital role educators play in harnessing PMTs to support the development of traditional as well as new, 21st-century skills, and for the argument that personalisation and pluralisation need to be conceptualised as complementary forces within 21st-century education reform. A community project, which deployed PMTs, is used to exemplify how personalised and pluralised educational goals can be integrated and pursued within teaching–learning activities mediated by innovative technologies and educational professionals.