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Getting on for 15 years ago I put David Wiley's precursor to Creative Commons "Open Content" licence on the wholly online Learning To Teach Online Course that I played a role in, having read about Wiley and the licence in the Economist. Wiley is still active in this field and this post has a very incisive observation in it about personalisation. I do not know whether I agree with it fully (adaptive learning and algorithms may/should have a role too): "There is simply no way to scale the centralized creation of educational materials personalized for everyone in the world (cf. the 15 years of learning objects hype and investment, which feels very similar to the current MOOC mania). Perhaps the only way to accomplish the amount of personalization necessary to achieve high quality at scale is to enable decentralized personalization to be performed locally by peers, teachers, parents, and others. And given the absolute madness of international copyright law there is no rights and royalties regime under which this personalization could possibly happen. The only practicable solution is to provide free, universal access to content, assessments, and other resources that includes free 4Rs permissions that empower local actors to engage in localization and redistribution."

Rather breathless interview with the "brains" behind adaptive learning company Knewton (sic). Jim may well have comments on this.

An interesting (?) commentary, by implication, on the long division / quadratic equation formula debate. Argues that the reason why learning effortlessly to use "mechanical alogorithms" matters is that this (can) give learners a clear understanding of an alogorithmic approach to solving mathematical problems. Not my field enough to know whether the arguments are well founded, however.