Personal Learning Environments June 4-24, 2007

My definition was a synthesis of what I gleaned from others in the blogosphere. I still believe that everyone is seeing the PLE as a digital tool. But a real thing like a textbook can be represented in the digital realm by metadata which describes something about it that is important to me, locates it in my hard copy, and links perhaps to a common source of metadata about it like Amazon. To get at artefacts down the track (why else would you have a PLE?), the PLE could either link directly to those items if they are digital, or indirectly through metadata.

Emma: Was trying to sort some material today for a workshop and found this cartoon . .



Part two is on the website
http://gwegner.edublogs.org/2007/04/28/gatekeepers-inc/

I completely agree on the relevance of learners that need to construct their own learning pathways. Any package PLE can only decrease the ability to express your own learning path and experience.

Thanx a lot for the links on complexity theory, I am going to read it now.

But could not it be possible that it depends on the type of learner you are, that you benefit from either non-constructed PLE's or packaged PLE's? I can imagine that structured learners have more problems in constantly looking to change their PLE in opposite to learners who just cannot accept rigidness (me included). Maybe the learner tools should be in function of the type of learners there are?

"willing to toss the PLE idea out the window"

I'm willing ultimately, to reduce the PLE down to something so simple as to be almost meaningless, such as "the browser" or "the internet". But perhaps there is a case for  pragmatism and looking at where a lot of intitutional learning is currently at, and how far it can be pushed in one phase without appearing to threaten their very existence too obviously.

In introducing the PLE concept there are already attempts to contain it within an intitutional framework. "Here is your PLE which we have supplied for you, and now you are required to use it if you want the accreditation". Developers seeking to "implement" PLEs because they've been asked to build one by somebody who will never really accept the idea of student autonomy which is inherent in the curriculum based on process rather than content described above.
 
Yes, I was a student myself quite recently, and I was able to use my own "PLE" as the basis for learning and even assesment which suited me finel. So at the end of three years I came out with a history of accounts with various online services, but also an established blog and a chaotic wiki  both running under my own domain which I think is important. I'm a great believer in the "small pieces loosely joined" approach but there is also a danger in encouraging people to hand over control of their PLE  to the service providers such as Google, Facebook etc or even James Farmer.

So I say, encourage them to buy and set up their own domain name and installed applications as early as possible, then they will have genuine ownership of a useful and enduring set of tools for lifelong learning which nobody else can delete at the end of the course.

Hi Bronwyn,

Complexity learning theory was a new one for me, although the underlying ideas are not. In the adult world there are so many examples of outcomes-assessed,  competency-based, objectives-driven, behaviourist, teleological, deterministic learning that profoundly squash innovation, creativity and problem-solving ability. Surely the ideal for life-long learning is student-centred under a broadly constructivist epistemology, with modelling and scaffolding (ie teaching, mentoring, resource availability) that reinforces a systems view of the world where outcomes emerge from complex interaction. Of course, this is a challenge in K-12 where the capacity for unstructured, collaborative, open-ended learning needs to be built up.

With respect, I think you are misunderstanding the mission of a PLE. I don't think those who are considering its merit (we're not talking Blackboard Inc) are imagining that it should impose a reductionist approach. Does your timber desk stop you from taking a systems view of the world? No, although if you spend too much time behind it you might not experience enough of the richness of life. Similarly, you don't experience everything about the world through your PLE, rather a PLE is something you come back to, with links and artefacts found in your greater life, which you can archive, link, catalogue, blog about, reflect on, elaborate on, and otherwise organise so they remain meaningful and accessible to you. As a life-long learner, you should still seek new sources of information, perspectives and relationships between things, some of which might be made easier with online tools accessible via your PLE.

Any PLE that forces a logical organisation of artefacts isn't a PLE, as far as I believe most see it. Rather, it has to be dynamically configurable, personalisable. It should be as deep and as wide as you want, as long as you have the time to maintain it. This goes with that today, tomorrow I throw that out and replace it with something else, which I relate to this. That feed is live, this one is suspended until I change my mind.  It's your surrogate memory, a digital whiteboard, online diary, subscription monitor, cognitive garden for a complex world.

Of course, that's the ideal. Remains to be seen if this is just too ambitious for either the average learner who doesn't know what RSS is, or the application builder who thinks flexibility is too complex to implement.

Not sure we need to throw PLE out the window. But it seems to me to be a concept rather than a tool, and we need to insist on thinking about it in those terms. It isnt a question of designing or finding or implementing a PLE, because each of us already have one, whether we like it or not!!

The conversation about PLEs is interesting because of the way it reveals and makes explicit the ways we use the loose aggregation of tools that we use to manage our learning, and how we behave within that combination of tools, and in that sense it gives insight. And that conversation may throw up useful combinations of tools that we can adopt for ourselves.

Unfortunately the terminology we use is problematic. It seems to me that in this context (education, learning, Internet) there is frequently a process in which a term is coined which originally is provocative and emphasises the way the new idea differs from previous ideas by similarity, usually the term changes one element or adds something. For example, e-learning or Web 2.0. and now P (as opposed to V) LE.  For a while the terms are useful,  but then through misunderstandings, the desire to commoditise them, or simple overuse they become reified. It seems to me that the term PLE frames the discussion in unhelpful ways, we are too used to seeing LEs of any kind as tools. Perhaps it is the term PLE that should be ditched, but it wont be, it is too late. What we can do is focus the discussion on uses and behaviours rather than on the idea of a PLE as a unified tool.

The other assumption that derives from the term that the PLE is online, or on a computer. Some of my work happens in environments (contexts if you like!!) into which it would not be sensible for me to take a computer. I take notes on paper, and that is part of my learning. I am still looking for ways to integrate that easily with the stuff on my computer ( I would welcome suggestions), but it isnt just a question of uploading, there are ways in which I think about that material, the way I record it, the way I process it that seem to me different to the ways I work on screen. It seems to me that that integration isnt just a technological issue. Emma mentioned baths and beaches, perhaps the way we think, turn over ideas in those contexts is different. How do you integrate that kind of learning with the rest?

I'm making use of Gliffy in some of the courses that I'm designing. Students need to be able to collaborate on creating floor plans and they're all over the province. We haven't gotten to the point where the students are using it, but the instructors think it's great.

Thank you. I added that site to my Wiki.

Hi Julia--I tried i-lighter, but found that I really missed actually seeing a yellow highlight on the page. At least when I was using it, i-lighter was more like Google Notebooks where it cut and pasted info, rather than physically highlighting it on the page. Now I use diigo, which I personally prefer. I have a couple of personal reviews on my site of i-lighter, Google Notebooks and Diigo that give my perspective, if you're interested in looking at other tools.

I agree to a point about the Free software - but the draw back of that is that it's hard to guarantee that it will be continued. It's always a difficult one to do, I think.

I've only used popular open source software - like The Gimp, Open Office & assorted Mozilla apps. I've never tried any of the less used software, so haven't had to experience something that's stopped being supported.

I've had experience in the past, as you mention, with software that starts being  beta - and starts to become commercial. MindMeister  and Gliffy are two tools that have started doing that - only limited accounts for free.

I've also read that Google is starting to offer premium accounts for Google Docs. Wonder if they will maintain the free ones forever ...

It's very hard to know what to do if we're thinking long term.

IN my case, I think that all students will have access to Groove - I'm not certain (we have two versions of MS office 2007) One for installing on Workstations - which I've not tried yet as it uninstalls Office 2003, and one for laptops - which I have tried, as you can maintain the two ... so I don't know if Groove will be on all PCs. But, of course, that's only when they're on campus, using University owned PCs. They don't get to install on their laptops, as they don't have University owned ones as I do. And I don't know enough about Groove to know what impact that will have!