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WCET PLE Article

- Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) allow learners to take more control of their learning through networked tools rather than being confined to institution-centric learning management systems. - PLEs are best understood as an overall approach rather than a single tool. They take advantage of syndication technologies like RSS and allow learners to access content through various readers and portals. PLEs also incorporate tools for creating and sharing content. - PLEs give learners greater ownership over their learning and help them connect with the most relevant resources and communities to support their lifelong learning and identities. However, issues still need to be addressed regarding how PLEs can be supported within formal education structures.

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33 views2 pages

WCET PLE Article

- Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) allow learners to take more control of their learning through networked tools rather than being confined to institution-centric learning management systems. - PLEs are best understood as an overall approach rather than a single tool. They take advantage of syndication technologies like RSS and allow learners to access content through various readers and portals. PLEs also incorporate tools for creating and sharing content. - PLEs give learners greater ownership over their learning and help them connect with the most relevant resources and communities to support their lifelong learning and identities. However, issues still need to be addressed regarding how PLEs can be supported within formal education structures.

Uploaded by

sleslie
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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WCET PLE Article

Draft1

Set out to define a "Personal Learning Environment" (or PLE) and you may end up
feeling like your hunting heffalumps or jackalopes - people will show you lots of nice
drawings, no two quite the same, but try to catch one in the wild and they seem to slip
through your fingers. Yet let me assure you, the mythical PLEs do exist, and you're likely
to recognize them with ever increasing frequency as learners start to take more control of
their networked learning with ever easier to use personal and ubiquitous social tools.

The term itself, "Personal Learning Environment," likely leads to one of the biggest
difficulties in spotting this beast in the wild, implying as it does a single tool or entity.
Partially a reaction to the perceived shortcomings of current online learning approaches,
partially a response to opportunities arising from a new breed of social network tools, and
partially growing out of an emerging understanding of the different opportunities that
networks afford learners, PLEs are instead best understood as an overall approach (rather
than a single application or technology). Unlike the current LMS-based approach, often
described as "institution centric," and typically requiring the learner to enter a single
'location' online to take an online course, PLEs typically take advantage of syndication
technologies like RSS that 'push' new content in a 'feed' that users can plug into a variety
of different readers, from desktop RSS aggregators like FeedDemon, to web-based ones
like Bloglines or Google Reader, to a new form of personal portal (often termed
'webtops') examples which include Netvibes or Pageflakes. Taking additional cues both
from the practice of blogging and from the general turn towards social constructivism,
PLEs also typically incorporate tools for producing content, both written and audio
visual. These can include blogging platforms like Blogger or Wordpress, to social
bookmarking tools, to media creation and sharing tools like eyespot or flickr. The
important commonality to note in all these cases is that not only will the majority of these
tools produce feeds, meaning both their content can be inserted elsewhere and notify
others (be they instructors, fellow learners or systems themselves) of new content, buthat
as essentially *networked* tools, they serve the dual purpose of performing the work
while at the same time sharing it with others to learn from or comment on without
additional effort. This key trait of many new web-based applications (often grouped
under the rubric 'Web 2.0') to both produce content that can flow into other spaces (or be
easily embeddable) and to provide functionality that makes the resulting work accessible
to others by default inclucates

the personal
• gives the learner the choice of where they interact with the content and other
learners
o greater ownership
o lifelong learning
 which tie into their existing and future online lives, practices and
identities
•
• connect learners with the most appropriate set of co-learners and the best experts
in any given field (taking advantage of the benefits of a global internet)
• help learners connect with the resources and people that is most relevant to
THEIR learning
• mashing together the learning environment as actually PART of the learning
process; the act of building and visualizing your learning environment and
network is a major step towards becoming a master learning, knowing not just
what you've learned but how you learned (and further supporting how you will
KEEP learning)

Ongoing Issues/Areas for Investigation

• how do we bridge (or should we) current 'formal'


approaches/strictures/structures/technologies with what seems like the push to
more learner-directed informal learning that both the philosophy of networked
learning and the approach of PLEs harken to
• small pieces loosely joined looks great on paper, but does seem to presume a level
of personal technical mastery that may not reflect current realities for either
learners or instructors. How can institutions provide scaffolding and support for
learners and instructors who need it while still facilitating the greatest amount of
individual choice?
• integration: how can 'loosely coupled' tools provide an experience for users that
competes with the the current integrated (monolithic) approaches of campus CMS
on issues like gradebook integration and scheduling, key considerations from the
formal education perspective
• how to reconcile the 'personal' approach with the longstanding notion of learning
as mastery of a specific set of knowledge; the sequencing that experience teaches
is the 'right' order to learn things

What can institutions and instructors do to enable and investigate a PLE-type approach?

(PLE workshop plug)

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