Digital twins and the terminology of “personalization” or “personalized learning” in educational policy: A discussion paper

Abstract

There has been a policy push in K-12 educational settings towards personalized learning in the last decade. Commercial platforms and learning designers have responded, offering learning tools to support teaching and learning through data-driven insights and recommendations. Trending towards the augmentation or replacing human teachers with non-human technology, this paper argues that personalized learning with human teachers is an entirely different process from personalization with digital twins. Drawing on new materialist thinking, it explores the impacts and implications for discourse concerning teacher quality and disadvantages within educational systems. It clarifies the conflation of the terms “personalized learning” and “personalization” to illuminate the power, positionality, and privilege enabled for some, in conflating terms in Australian educational policy.