How to advance personalised learning?

Just found a great article linked from Tom March's presentation indicating that personalized learning is a grand challenge for engineering. I'm amazed how well the criteria and goal setting matches my own thoughts on a PLE of the future, especially with regard to intelligent systems for tracking student learning. I had not considered them "recommenders", but the technology is a wonderful fit. Once students complete a unit and "rate" it, you can use heuristics to find other students of a similar disposition and use their chosen learning path as an indicator of what to study next (similar to amazon's "people who bought this also liked X").

I also need to dig into what Tom March was talking about when he mentioned Curriculum Mapping. It sounds like the same process I'm looking for to lay out the web of prerequisites for each unit.

On a side note, VR is also listed as an engineering challenge right above personal learning. How convenient. It doesn't bode well for my plans though if I want to implement a combination of 2 challenges ...