This paper reports on a Research Project designed to explore how individuals might be enabled to collate, curate and reflect upon the rich diversity of their learning lives (Biesta et al, 2011; Erstad et al, 2009) through the use of personal data and new technologies.

The project was premised upon the growing awareness that Europeans are living lives in which huge amounts of data are being gathered about each person (WEF, 2011). Mechanisms for gathering such data include ambient processes (e.g. use of search engines and tracking of online activity), institutional processes (e.g. through our interactions with public services and companies) and intentional processes (e.g. through our use of digital photography, social networking and record keeping).

The project was also informed by the growing evidence of the richness and complexity of individuals’ ‘learning lives’ across the life-course and across a range of different sites, from schools, to homes, to communities and the workplace (Colley & Hodgkinson, 2003). In an era of a rich educational ecosystem that extends beyond schools and universities to sites of informal and professional learning, to online educational resources and to community knowledge exchanges, new tools are needed to enable learners, educators and others to make sense of such a complex landscape (Facer, 2011). 

The ability to harness the personal ‘information aura’ surrounding each person has the potential to be radically transformative of traditional educational institutions. This personal ‘information aura’, for example, has the potential to support the development of entirely new approaches to assessment, allowing the validation and recognition of learning in multiple settings (Halavais, 2011). It opens up the possibility of challenging educational inequalities, making visible the highly divergent histories and communities from which young people draw, allowing all young people to make visible their often overlooked interests and experiences beyond the school walls. It makes possible new approaches to teaching and learning, allowing young people to treat themselves as their own subjects for serious analysis and inquiry. It offers, in other words, the potential to radically disrupt existing careers, guidance, teaching and learning, assessment and institutional relationships that underpin traditional education settings.

Our aim in this exploratory project was to understand what broad motivations shaped people’s need or interest to learn; what (if anything) might motivate individuals to intentionally capture records of their informal (learning) experiences; and what (if anything) they might use intentional, institutional or ambient data gathered as part of their informal learning practices for in future.

To explore these questions, we took a person-centred rather than institutional or site-centred approach, arguing that if we wanted to understand the richness and complexity of individuals’ learning lives, then we needed to locate the individual rather than the institution at the heart of the process.

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