The Wales-Wide Web | Personal Learning Environments

31 Oct 09

Ruby Vine

PLN PLE learning web2.0 education attwell

27 Jun 09

Paulo Simões

ple

01 Jun 09

monica aresta

Attwell, G. (2006, Junho 1).The Wales-Wide Web – Personal Learning Environments. http://www.knownet.com/writing/weblogs/Graham_Attwell/entries/6521819364 (acedido em 8 de Junho de 2009)

ple learning web2.0

18 Apr 09

manu dea

The paper will attempt to blend the educational or learning issues and the more technical issues. Educational technology should be shaped by the users, rather than shape or inhibit learning. Yet even this raises issues. Is the PLE just what it says? A personal learning environment belonging solely to the learner, or should the education system and educational institutions also have a say in the shaping of these tools?

Personal Learning Environments learning

Lifelong learning is hardly a new idea
Informal learning is something of a conundrum
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- An important development in education in the past period has been the translation of qualifications into outcomes and competences.
- The development of ubiquitous computing may offer new opportunities for the use of ICT for learning.
- Social software is used here in the meaning of software that lets people rendezvous, connect or collaborate by use of a computer network
- Social software underpins what is loosely referred to as Web 2
- In software terms, rather than monolithic vendor driven and designed applications, Web 2 and social software is based on the idea of 'small pieces, loosely connected' utilising commonly recognised standards and web services for linking ideas, knowledge and artefacts.

01 Feb 09

Patty Ball

PD PLE PLN e-learning Education elearning elearning2.0 learning professional_development professionaldevelopment WEB2.0

02 Jan 09

Salford PGRs

ple

15 Dec 08

Dwayne Harapnuik

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09 Dec 08

E. Alana James

PLE

13 Oct 08

Youenn Leborgne

Great article about Personal Learning Environments (PLE)

personal e-learning social reflection showcase tool IDEL_MSc

The idea of a Personal Learning Environment recognises that learning is continuing and seeks to provide tools to support that learning. It also recognises the role of the individual in organising their own learning. Moreover, the pressures for a PLE are based on the idea that learning will take place in different contexts and situations and will not be provided by a single learning provider. Linked to this is an increasing recognition of the importance of informal learning
The promise of Personal Learning Environments could be to extend access to educational technology to everyone who wishes to organise their own learning. Furthermore the idea of the PLE purports to include and bring together all learning, including informal learning, workplace learning, learning from the home, learning driven by problem solving and learning motivated by personal interest as well as learning through engagement in formal educational programmes.
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- Personal Learning Environments could also facilitate different styles of learning.
- All educational software, implicitly or otherwise, either enhances or restrains certain pedagogic approaches to learning. There is no such thing as pedagogically neutral software. A Personal Learning Environment could allow a leaner to configure and develop a learning environment to suit and enable their own style of learning.
- PLEs could facilitate such presentations, in an extended form of an e-Portfolio and through links to an e-Portfolio.
- Ubiquitous computing
- In other words the context in which learning takes place becomes the context in which the learning is to be applied and the nature of the learning interface - or the learning materials become the occupational tools with which the (work process) knowledge is carried out.
- PLEs can develop this potential by facilitating access to learning in different contexts and using different devices and interfaces. Secondly PLEs can bring together learning acquired in different contexts.
- Social software and Web 2
- Social software has already led to widespread adoption of portfolios for learners bringing together learning from different contexts an sources of learning and providing an on-going record of lifelong learning, capable of expression in different forms.
- The idea of the Personal Learning environment is in effect a Web 2, social software concept. Although we still are unsure of what exactly a PLE is, there would appear to be a common understanding that PLEs provide tools and functionality for creating knowledge, as well as consuming it. Furthermore, there seems to be a common agreement that a PLE will facilitate connections between people and between different software applications.
- How we use computers for learning
- learning and how that is shifting. He pointed to the growth of discovery or experiential learning.
- Navigation is being coupled to discovery and discovery being coupled to bricolage but you do not dare build on whatever you discover unless you can make a judgement concerning its quality or trustworthiness.
- The final dimension Seely Brown addressed was that of action. He suggests new forms of learning are based on trying things and action, rather than on more abstract knowledge.
- In contrast to the paucity of formal learning provision in the SMEs studied, there was a great deal of informal learning taking place.
- For a search result to be useful it needs to both produce materials, ideas and concepts which can connect with the learner's existing knowledge base of the one hand and approach the issue or problem being addressed on the other.
- Legitimate peripheral participation is not itself an educational form, much less a pedagogical strategy or a teaching technique. It is an analytic viewpoint on learning, a way of understanding learning. We hope to make it clear that learning through legitimate peripheral participation takes place no matter which educational form provides a context for learning, or whether there is any intentional educational form at all. Indeed, this viewpoint makes a fundamental distinction between learning and intentional instruction
- Learners wills eek a community with knowledge at a higher level than their own but which can connect with their prior learning, learning and practice. Typically they will lurk in order to understand the workings of the community and to gain some basic knowledge. After a period of time they might contribute in the form of a question and later again might themselves contribute to the hared knowledge pool. In this ways they move from the periphery through lurking to full bound participants in a community. It should be noted that communities are frequently overlapping and that the use of hyper-links and more recently standards like track-back allow the communities to be dynamic with the emergence of new groups and discourses.
- Despite the widespread and increasing use of computers for informal learning and for communicating, creating and sharing, educational technology remain less than compelling. Compare the vibrancy of many of the web spaces targeted at young people and the massive take up of My Space, compared to the lack of discourse on many institutional VLEs.
- I am unconvinced that our present educational technology, based essentially on managing learning, rather than encouraging creativity, provides any better motivation for learners.
- If learning is a social process (Guile and Young, 1997), then any consideration of the development and impact of e-learning and e-learning technologies needs to examine the wider social, economic and cultural processes and discourses involved in the development and implementation of new technologies in education.
- Three dominant policy discourses in education have shaped the development and implementation of e-learning: commodification, privatisation and a restricted discourse of lifelong learning, which in turn are based on broader discourses around globalisation and the privatisation of knowledge.
  
  Such dominant discourses have tended towards limiting the impact of ICT within the mainstream education and training systems and of holding back the development of new didactic and pedagogic approaches within formal learning.
  
  The danger is that the education system will become irrelevant to many peoples learning needs. It will be seen as an imposition. Young people will turn to social spaces for communication and developing ideas. Access to quality learning provision for adults will be dependent on companies and private training providers.
- The most compelling argument for the PLE is to develop educational technology which can respond to the way people are using technology for learning and which allows them to themselves shape their own learning spaces, to form and join communities and to create, consume, remix, and share material.
- What might a PLE look like?
- The argument for a Personal Learning Environment application is to provide easy access to a range of services, applications and functionality for learners. There is a danger that we create a new form of the walled garden. If the PLE is to be developed as an application., it needs to be easily configured to allow the use of personal tools and applications instead of the default settings.
- A second major issue is who provides services.
- PLE services would need to be as permissive in allowing learners to use services in the way they wish.
- An e-portfolio should work on and off-line.
- PLEs should interact and connect with multiple digital devices.
- the suer should have fine grained control over what and when they wish to share with other users and with whom.
- the PLE should allow learners to bring together collections of learning materials from different sources.
- The PLE should incorporate not only access to search engines but the ability to classify and store searches and bookmarks.
- it is important that updating to new versions is very simple.
- should be easy to install and maintain.
- Ease of use and extendable functionality
- The PLE should assist the leaner in presenting the learning in different ways for different purposes.
- It almost goes without saying that the PLE should support interoperability and standards.
- It would seem to be helpful if a PLE could assist learners in planning and sequencing their own learning
- A PLE should also allow people to add their own metadata and to share that metadata
- Next Steps
- Firstly there are some prototype PLE-like applications already in being piloted. Besides the JISV funded Plex application, the ELGG Personal Learning Landscape supports many of the functions of a PLE and has a growing installation base in many parts of the world. No doubt other such applications could be identified.
- But perhaps more important is the increasing use of social software
- One thing is certain - there can be no such thing as the Personal Learning Environment. It is better to envisage a family of different applications and services which support the conception of such of the PLE.

10 Jul 08

Allison Kipta

There is a buzz at events bringing together educational technologists. That buzz is called Personal Learning Environments. Yet, a year and a half after serious discussion broke out in the edu-blogosphere, there is little agreement on what a Personal Learn

ple eportfolio

08 Jul 08

paco perez

ple

24 Jun 08

anja c. wagner

Guter Basistext zu PLE

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02 Apr 08

Pannir selvam

bookpeixe2006F

24 Mar 08

raman srinivasan

prema SWARNA priya

Swarna Srinivasan

prema SWARNA priya

26 Feb 08

Kristen Kozloski

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03 Feb 08

Isabelle Jones

teaching research PLE learning education e-learning collaboration Article blog

02 Feb 08

Fernando S

desarrollo personal_learning_environment ple post

18 Dec 07

jamie506

当前研究

06 Dec 07

alex yu

del.icio.us imported ple

24 Oct 07

Michele Notari

blog blogs article Education eLearning elearning2.0 PLE Web2.0

28 Jul 07

he yin

There is a buzz at events bringing together educational technologists. That buzz is called Personal Learning Environments. Yet, a year and a half after serious discussion broke out in the edu-blogosphere, there is little agreement on what a Personal Learning Environment is, still less on what it might mean if translated to a learning application. Neither is there agreement on who it is for or who might own or use it. Does it replace VLEs or is it a plug in or additional application? Is it any different to an extended e-Portfolio? There is not even agreement as to whether a PLE should be an application or if it is just a collection of user-configured tools.
The idea of a Personal Learning Environment recognises that learning is continuing and seeks to provide tools to support that learning. It also recognises the role of the individual in organising their own learning. Moreover, the pressures for a PLE are based on the idea that learning will take place in different contexts and situations and will not be provided by a single learning provider. Linked to this is an increasing recognition of the importance of informal learning.
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- Jay Cross (2006) argues that only 10 -15 per cent of learning is formal, that 85 per cent of our learning takes place outside of formal settings. Yet there has been little attention paid to informal learning or to how it takes place (see below for more consideration of this).
- Jay Cross (2006)
- A Personal Learning Environment could allow a leaner to configure and develop a learning environment to suit and enable their own style of learning.
- A Personal Learning Environment could allow a leaner to configure and develop a learning environment to suit and enable their own style of learning.
- t is also important to note that formal qualifications are increasingly only seen as one aspect of competence, at least for employment purposes. Employers also increasingly wish to see evidence of the ability to apply skills and knowledge in a particular context. PLEs could facilitate such presentations, in an extended form of an e-Portfolio and through links to an e-Portfolio.
- Ubiquitous computing
  
  The term ubiquitous computing refers to two technological developments. The first is the growing ubiquitous nature of internet connectivity with the development of wireless and GSM networks, as well as the spread of broadband, resulting in connectivity becoming available almost everywhere in the future. It is also expected that devices will be able to search for and seamlessly switch to utilise available networks. The second and associated use of the term is for the many different devices now able to access the internet, including mobile communication devices such as PDAs but also household appliances and industrial and electronic tools and machinery.
- PLEs can develop this potential by facilitating access to learning in different contexts and using different devices and interfaces. Secondly PLEs can bring together learning acquired in different contexts.
- PLEs can develop this potential by facilitating access to learning in different contexts and using different devices and interfaces. Secondly PLEs can bring together learning acquired in different contexts.
- The idea of the Personal Learning environment is in effect a Web 2, social software concept. Although we still are unsure of what exactly a PLE is,
- there would appear to be a common understanding that PLEs provide tools and functionality for creating knowledge, as well as consuming it. Furthermore, there seems to be a common agreement that a PLE will facilitate connections between people and between different software applications.
- Seely Brown's early study has been reinforced by more recent research by Pew Research (2005). The study found that 56 per cent of young people in America were using computers for creative activities, writing and posting of the internet, mixing and constructing multimedia and developing their own content. 12 to 17-year-olds look to web tools to share what they think and do online. One in five who use the net said they used other people's images, audio or text to help make their own creations. According to Lee Raine, author of the study,
- Raine, author of the study,
- Lave and Wenger (
- This study is important not only in showing how people are using computers for learning but in their use of learning materials. Few of those we surveyed used formal learning materials. they were using materials they found on the web for learning. In education, we have tended to focus on the development of formal learning materials and have ignored the vast potential of freely available 'objects' of all kinds (not formal learning objects!) freely available for learning purposes.
- First though, I wish to briefly comment on the issue of whether we need a PLE application at all. It can be argued that most of the features of a PLE can be supported by existing desktop applications and social software. The list below is of the software I use for my personal learning environment (in a later version of this paper I will provide this in diagrammatic form).
  
  Word processor for writing papers like this - Nisus Writer Express
  E-mail client for communication - Mac Mail
  Diary for managing my work and sharing with others- iCal linked to my web site
  Audio for making podcasts - Garage Band
  Video editor for making multi media presentations - iMovie
  Weblog client for various blogs I contribute to - Ecto
  Content Management System for creating web sites - Jumbla
  Personal Weblog - Knotes
  Photo editing programme - iPhoto (and plug in for uploading to Flickyr)
  Photo sharing service - Flickyr
  Web Browser - Firefox
  Bookmark sharing service - Delicio-us
  Podcast publishing - Jumbla plug in
  Presentation software - Keynote
  Newsreader - Net Newsreader
  Instant messaging and VOIP - Skype
  Search engines - mainly Spotlight and Google
  FTP client for sharing multimedia files - FileChute
- diagrammatic form).
  
  Word processor for writing papers like this - Nisus Writer Express
  E-mail client for communication - Mac Mail
  Diary for managing my work and sharing with others- iCal linked to my web site
  Audio for making podcasts - Garage Band
  Video editor for making multi media presentations - iMovie
  Weblog client for various blogs I contribute to - Ecto
  Content Management System for creating web sites - Jumbla
  Personal Weblog - Knotes
  Photo editing programme - iPhoto (and plug in for uploading to Flickyr)
  Photo sharing service - Flickyr
  Web Browser - Firefox
  Bookmark sharing service - Delicio-us
  Podcast publishing - Jumbla plug in
  Presentation software - Keynote
  Newsreader - Net Newsreader
  Instant messaging and VOIP - Skype
  Search engines - mainly Spotlight and Google
  FTP client for sharing multimedia files - FileChute
- Who provides services?
  
  A second major issue is who provides services. In the example of my personal learning environment, I use a mixture of desktop applications and external web spaces, applications and services. There is a major issue as to who is controlling and storing data and the reliability of those services. Of course, services could be provided by individual educational institutions. But that would exclude access to those not currently enrolled on a formal learning programme. Furthermore, it would create problems if a leaner was accessing programmes in more than one institution although adherence to standards would reduce that problem. But what happens when someone completes their course and leaves the institution. This is already an issue with regard to e-Portfolios. At least one UK university is already considering offering maintenance of e-Portfolios as a commercial alumni service. I am unconvinced that the scenario of educational institutions competing to sell technology services is desirable. Better would be the creation of a national (networked) service offering everyone access to Personal Learning Environment services, regardless of whether they are presently participating in an educational course. Helen Barret has argued that we should provide everyone with their own personnel web space to encourage creativity and learning. There is a danger that such a space would be spurned by young people seeing it as an extension of the education system. The attraction of MySpace is in the lack of prescription of what a user may do. PLE services would need to be as permissive in allowing learners to use services in the way they wish.
  
  Other issues and features