Page 72 - Looking_after_school

Looking after school: a critical analysis of personalisation in education

constant reality check: monitoring the balance of how you see yourself
and how others perceive you. The ideal, and this is a constant pursuit,

is to profile yourself in such a way that how you see yourself and how
others perceive you correspond with each other. The term ‘person’ and
its derivatives, such as unicity, identity, and authenticity, refer exactly
to this ideal. There can therefore be no ‘I as a person’ without that

(public) profiling, and without the match between how you recognise/
acknowledge yourself and how others recognise/acknowledge you.
Personalisation thus refers to the following mechanism: the constant

attempt to search for a profile or a ‘personage’ in which you are recog-
nised/acknowledged both by others and by yourself. Personalisation
is thus always about the level of (social) recognition/acknowledgment.
We can see this at work in how a learning portfolio – representing

the learning achievements which make someone unique - profiles
the learner, but also in other profiles that are made by or for a virtual

learning environment.
Figure 3. 360° feedback diagram

This mechanism that we are describing is different from the other
power diagrams. Whilst the law asks for submission, and the norm

for discipline, the profile requires constant monitoring, which means

both constant assessment and visibility. The profile thus requires
a monitor that constantly observes in order to be able to warn or
caution swiftly when something is amiss. It is precisely here that
feedback appears as the reigning technique of power. Wiener, one of
the founders of cybernetics, describes feedback as “the property of
being able to adjust future conduct by past performance” (Wiener,
1950/1989, p. 33). And, he adds that this requires mechanisms to “per-

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