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Personalisation, where learning is tailored to students' needs, interests and aptitudes, is a powerful approach to education but, for many teachers, putting it into practice can be a challenge. So how can we achieve personalisation that is based on the active involvement of learners and what role might technology play in this process?

Learner control and 'learner voice' are important aspects of personalisation. Learners - anyone - can only achieve an authentic 'voice' to the extent that they know themselves as individuals. The voice of someone who does not know themselves may not be a personal voice, but rather the voice of a stereotype; a role; a subculture - someone else's voice. Personalisation without a real knowledge of the learner's needs, interests and aptitudes is largely meaningless: it could be merely the replication of peer group norms, giving the appearance of something personal without the substance.

So, for learners to gain control over their own personalised learning, they have to truly understand their own needs, interests and aptitudes - otherwise their learning will have to be 'personalised' for them, perhaps by others who may not know them well enough to do this. Achieving the self-knowledge needed for authentic personalisation can sound frighteningly introspective. But it need not be so.

Technology, which is often seen as impersonal, can help us to deepen our self-knowledge - through self-observation and reflection. Recording what we do, at the time of doing it or shortly after, is widely used within personal and professional development, and portfolio technology is increasingly used to help with the storage of personal records, recalling them for reflection, and the storage of the reflections as well. For example, portfolio tools designed for personal development planning are currently available to assist us when considering a new career. They can help us to assess our competence in the areas needed for entry to that career, figure out which skills need improving, and then find out which courses are most appropriate for helping us to fill the gaps in our competence.

Many young people are already engaged in technology-assisted activities that could lead to them developing deeper self-knowledge. For example, every day, thousands record, reflect on and comment on their own and others' daily lives, through blogs and other social software. These activities neither require an introspective personality nor any special skills or motivation - young people are often simply looking to interact with a peer group.

Many of these activities could be adapted to help young people to determine their needs, interests and aptitudes, and thus help with personalisation. Use of even the more basic kinds of social software could be the starting point for individual reflection and social comment - and thus for learning about themselves. Students could, for example, rate a course for their peers, providing comment - and so insight - for both themselves and others. They could take this a stage further, asking "why did I (not) do well on that course?"

Consider the ways in which information can now be gathered automatically. Take satellite navigation to start with. If mobile phones can use their location to send a stream of position data to a data store, which can be used in conjunction with learners' portfolio systems, the hard work of recording and tracing what events have happened, when and where, on any given day would be made much easier. Of course this information could be highly sensitive, and young people would naturally want to ensure that it is only used for approved purposes involving approved people. But given this constraint, there are many kinds of functionality which could result. Serendipitous meetings could be arranged on the spur of the moment, for example when travelling on the same train as someone with a mutual interest. Educators and learners could store notes related to very specific places, which could easily be accessed by people close to those places. Thus, a physical landscape could be populated with learning resources. It is easy to see how this could help students of, for example, natural history, architecture or urban design.

Beyond having access to where we have been, information about who we have met on the way could be vitally useful to jogging the memory and recollecting what actually happened. One way of recording the people we encounter as we go about our daily lives would be to use cameras together with face recognition. There are already systems available which claim to recognise particular faces in photos, after the systems have been trained on examples of photos of those particular people. So, all you would need to do is point your mobile phone or digital camera at someone you already know, and press a couple of buttons.

Voice recognition would be another way for students to gather information about conversations they've had, particularly if the technology were sophisticated enough to put a name to a voice and determine what was being said. Such systems might well be used to pick out key words which have been flagged as being of particular personal significance. In a learning context, learners could note words of particular significance to the learning outcomes. This could then mean that the flagged words could provide an automatic index to the sections of an audio file that are likely to be of particular interest to the student. This kind of indexing of audio files could prove invaluable, avoiding the enormous burden of listening through hours of recordings.

Wearable and other mobile devices too have the potential to help us to record what we and others are doing. Sensors for pressure, position or flexing, either built in to clothing or handheld, could distinguish basic categories such as sitting, walking, running. This could be time-indexed to further enrich the automatic record of what we have been doing.

Of course these technologies would need to be flexible, to enable different types of portfolio for different learner preferences and to ensure that the different types of media stored are not fragmented. Assuming that this can be achieved (which it can), they offer the capacity to increase the amount of information that young people can access about themselves, their activities and their surroundings. The easier it is for them automatically to record their actions and words, as well as those of the world around them, the easier it is to create useful records of their lives - although a cultural shift may be required in all of us to accept this approach (as it is not without social implications). The application and use of this information can go beyond the increasingly common practice of reflecting on their skills and abilities. It can help to clarify preferences, motivations and personal values, and can be stored by the portfolio systems as 'ethical profiles'. These could then help learners to understand better their own identities, leading to personalisation that could potentially play a part in many spheres of their life. As well as helping learners to choose courses and institutions that are more closely in tune with who they feel they are and want to be, this ethical approach could support choices of activity, job, career, consumer behaviour, and investment of time as well as money.

All of this technology already exists. Whether, and when, it is used to enhance young people's ability to learn about themselves, and thus to contribute to authentic personalisation where the learner is in control, will naturally depend on cost, popularity and the development of educational approaches that embrace this technology. If a Web 2.0 approach is taken, where it is made easy to reuse information in different contexts, then it becomes increasingly likely that people will think up compelling motivations for gathering it - and we could well be looking at an education system that not only calls for personalised learning but one where innovative technology supports its implementation.

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