bronwyn hegarty

I am amazed at the different ways you all have in expressing opinion abut my original question on this thread.

do you believe a teacher presence is vital for a successful PLE?

It looks like overall that people see the PLE as a self-directed learning tool which works best when shared with others so we get the advantages of social interaction and comment. So the teacher is probably not vital but could contribute to the learning experience for the PLE user.

Michele sums it up for me with this comment - I have put other comments below which indicate the thread of where this discussion led us:

“…what's exciting about the construct of PLEs is the potential to ignite people's passion for learning and to provide them with the tools and skills to pursue what gets them excited."

Bronwyn

Summary of other comments

Derek said: “sometimes, No.  But I reserve the right to change my answer.

Emma said: “One of my views, and it's coming from a Higher Education (and often post graduate teaching point of view), is that you do need the teacher to get the students going, though to provide guidance, rather than answers”

“As to "learning in isolation" - ..very personal ..When I'm learning, at times I like to think things through on my own. Other times, I'll be selective over who I share with; yet other times I'm not bothered who reads it. But, I'd like that control.“

Deidre said: “tasks need to fit outcomes, so if one of the outcomes is to improve your teamwork or to increase your tolerence for opinions other than your own, then group work is a legitimate expectation”

Sylvia said : “Courses often become very much like the independent studies of the print distance ed delivery model. ...some students do very well in these courses. “

Michele said: “PLEs ... are really more about self-directed learning and wider learning that encompasses a variety of formal and informal processes, including social connection.”

Cristina said: “a PLE only makes sense if it is shared with others, ... others ..have a(nother) chance to contribute to my learning, by commenting on it……a PLE can be a personal space, which one administers, but not an isolated one, since one makes it available to everyone. “

Michele said: “learning for most people has become very passive. People wait for someone to decide what they should learn and wait for someone to teach it to them. The beauty of the personal learning concept ... it creates a construct for people to navigate through their own learning landscape, including deciding what they will learn and how they will learn it.”

" Imagine how great the world would be if it was filled with people who were excited about personal and professional development on a daily basis!” This is great!

Hello all
Thanks for sharing Derek's diagram Derek. It looks like it is getting more complex compared to the original one I have seen.....plenty of steam rising in the creation of it I reckon.

It strikes me in all this talk about personal learning ecologies and PLEs that we are paying a lot of attention to the structure of the system. I would like to explore how Derek's proposed system can help with learning. At the moment the diagram represents a mish mash of ways to collect together content - very important but not enough to stimulate engagement and reflection and deep learning.

Inherent in the use of some of the tools e.g. blogs, is a belief that communication will happen but I think we need to look carefully at this. Just because we keep a blog does not mean that someone will give us feedback on the content. We could also have a collection of tools in a system such as that proposed by D and have no interaction at all with another human being. At least in a classroom, there is a teacher to guide or control the learning.

My question is how can a PLE incorporate teacher presence and scaffolded learning and still enable the learners to have autonomy in their choices?

Is a PLE only really any good for the development of a cognitive presence online? i.e. information processing and can this truly happen without discourse and input from another human? Does a PLE automatically stimulate social interaction? I have found that there is no guarantee of a social presence i.e. interaction with other students, and even if this occurs and is unguided and unstructured, how much learning actually occurs? I believe that if any system such as a PLE is to succeed, teacher presence is very important. There is more about the ideas of cognitive, social and teacher presence in an article called:

Farmer, J. (2004). Communication dynamics: Discussion boards, weblogs and the development of communities of inquiry in online learning environments. In R. Atkinson, C. McBeath, D. Jonas-Dwyer & R. Phillips (Eds), Beyond the comfort zone: Proceedings of the 21st ASCILITE Conference (pp. 274-283). Perth, 5-8 December. http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/perth04/procs/farmer.html

Actual example of the use of social networking tools and strategies in a course.
In a course where I teach design for flexible learning, we have encouraged participants to set up their own PLEs using a blog, del.icio.us account, mailing list and wiki as the backbone. They also have access to a LMS discussion and content on a course wiki,and are encouraged to use a range of open source software e.g. audacity for audio, gimpshop and gimp for image manipulation,  CMap and Gliffy for mindmapping, and web-based tools e.g. Flickr (images), Bubbleshare, slideshare, Youtube, bliptv. There is variable take-up. Some really explore and try out lots of things to design and create resources and a learning space for themselves, others sit on the fringes.

The blogs which each student is required to keep and the course wiki and mailing list, and del.ici.ous accounts depend very much on an active teacher presence to keep the participants linked and motivated. It also depends on these items being connected to the course assessment. The tools are there, but without facilitation by the "teachers" the participants tend to learn in isolation apart from when they come together for f2f workshops.

We have found that unless guidance is provided by the "teachers" very few of them provide feedback to each others' blogs, contribute to the wiki or del.ici.ous account or contribute meaningful discussion to the mailing list.

What experiences have others had, and do you believe a teacher presence is vital for a successful PLE?
Bronwyn

...If you believe in the Chaos theory of learning or Complexity learning theory -you will see the relevance of learners constructing their own learning pathways in an environment which may be quite discombobulated...not managed neatly at all in a one page/site fits all mentality. i.e. a LMS, website or PLE - in the strict definition of the term.

Surely we need to flow as our learning needs change by the hour, by the day? If I get slotted into a neat PLE system whatever that is, I have already constructed walls and barriers to some extent. The very act of selection has reduced my perceptive field of vision. I have become set in my webways, my pre-determined feeds and structures and tools. Complexity may be eliminated and in doing so I have reduced my learning potential. A PLE has now become a lineated web ...a contradiction in terms really.

For more on complexity theory you may like to read Developing Online From Simplicity toward Complexity: Going with the Flow of Non-Linear Learning by Renata Phelps

"Complexity’s perspective is that teachers need to accept students’ ability to organise, construct and structure learning, combining supportive and challenging behaviour; equilibrium with disequilibrium. ‘Curriculum becomes a process of development rather than a body of knowledge to be covered or learned"

It is fascinating to see so many perspectives on the topic of PLEs. When Glen mentions the newspaper as a valid PLE he is missing the point. Didn't PLEs come about as a result of web2 technobes wanting to break away from the rigid mentality of using a LMS or VLC for learning? Thus moving us onto web 2 ways of interacting and as a lead up to web 3 - even more intelligent ways of organising and using information to extract meaning. So PLE does refer to web-based learning.

From Wikipedia: "There is also debate over whether the driving force behind Web 3.0 will be intelligent systems, or whether intelligence will emerge in a more organic fashion, from systems of intelligent people, such as via collaborative filtering services like del.icio.us, Flickr and Digg that extract meaning and order from the existing Web and how people interact with it.^[5]"

I believe the PLE was born from a need to harness the freedom of the web and to help us escape from being trapped in a web warp experience such as that provided by LMSs such as Blackboard, Moodle, WebCT etc. ePortfolios were the interim measure and were in favour for a blink of a second....there are some people still murmuring about them...quietly.

PLEs in the true intention of the term are web-based environments which we construct using our own choice of socially networked tools. aren't they?

But big names are now trying to build them for us so we can slot neatly once more into a comfortable cyber existence. Isn't the Google interface and other facilities such as pageflakes, Facebook, netvibes etc just another trap to get us comfortable and organised. I find firefox and having lots of tabs open works pretty well so my organisation is dynamic to fit the situation and my need at the time. Bloglines does help me organise RSS feeds....

I believe this relates to Complexity learning theory which I have written about on another post......
Bronwyn