Thus far: I think the idea of and the development of Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) by students, academics and researchers is the key to what I want to be involved with in the latter years of my career in HE as a teacher.
What is a PLE? How does it incorporate and/or sit on top of or beside a) the institutional VLE, b) the physical and face-to-face elements of the learning environment (traditional campus plus conferences and seminars, e.g.), c) our off-campus lives and selves, d) the whole learning ecology that is life.
How do PLEs contribute to other key educational agendas in a University and beyond? I am particularly interested in issues to do with information literacy, academic writing and life long learning.
How do PLEs contribute to issues connected to personal development, personal development plans (PDP)s, e-portfolios, etc.
Some initial readings containing key ideas relevant to PLEs:
Educational Social Overlay Networks (Terry Anderson; Elgg post). “..Educational social software can be used effectively to create a type of overlay network to enhance the more formal institutional network consisting of student support , library, tuition, registration and other institutionalized services..”.
Educational Social Overlay Networks (Terry Anderson) “Scott Leslie nicely raises a discussion of the relationship between educational social software tools and the current generation of Learning Management Systems (LMS). The challenge is to recognize which components of the learner’s life should be situated in their individual web space and those that should be running in the space of the formal educational institution”.
When learning goes underground (George Siemens). “Administrators, learning designers, and teachers are facing a new kind of learner - someone who has control over the learning tools and processes. When educators fail to provide for the needs of learners (i.e. design learning in an LMS only), learners are able to “go underground” to have their learning needs met”.
The PLE debate begins (Scott Wilson). “Nice to see some discussion around the PLE concept. Leigh Blackall takes the most critical position, and Dave Cormier examines Leigh’s position. Meanwhile, Stephen Downes notices the commotion…”.
PLE Reference Model presentation as a PPT file (926k) from CETIS Conference (Colin Milligan).
Why provide a VLE? (Ben Werdmuller). “Christopher D. Sessums pointed me to this post by Graham Attwell about VLEs. Graham suggests that: ‘We assume students will provide their own word processors - be they proprietary or open source. Why then do we persist in providing e-learning systems. Not because of generosity I would suggest but because institutions are desperate to maintain control. I think this is possibly true for unconnected learning environments’”
Academic Writing & Citations (Joan Vinall-Cox) “..Academic writing has changed radically since I was an undergrad many years ago. When I wrote my Ph.D. thesis a year and a half ago, I made rich use of the capabilities of word-processing”.
Taking back the university (Christopher D. Sessums). “The more I study the nature of technology, teaching, and learning, the more I come to realize that the structure and design of most universities prevents deep, meaningful learning from happening”.
Personal Learning Environments are getting closer (Graham Attwell). “Occasionally a project does grab my attention. The one which I am excited about at the moment is the Personal Learning Environments project”.
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