According to the Educause publication, 7 things you should know about personal learning environments, PLEs:
- comprise the tools, communities, and services (not necessarily restricted to the online) that constitute the individual platforms learners use to direct their own learning and pursue educational goals
- and thus illustrate how individuals approach the task of learning
- because of what has been said above, PLSs are learner-centric
- as they put the learner in charge of their own learning processes
- and also promote authentic learning by incorporating expert feedback into learning activities and resource
- PLEs allow students to draw connections from a growing matrix of resources that they select and organise and thus become an extension of the historical model of individual research
- this way they require students to engage in ongoing decision making to maintain, organise and grow their learning environments (this is the stage I am at and which is illustrated by my iGoogle pages)
- but, what is more important, PLEs constitute an environment where ideas are generated, problems queried, and content created and where feedback becomes the combined output of peers, colleagues, and friends as well as experts and critics
- what I have learnt about PLEs and what I consider to be a task for me now is that my PLE should integrate the resources that include the work and voice of others as readily as a my own critical reflection and scholarly work
I hope the image below reflects what my ePLE looks like now and what changes I am planning to introduce to address the fact that I should move from just listening in and reading to actively contributing to the communities, sharing and collaborating. That would be in vein of learning by doing and teaching others in order to maximise your own learning.
You can see a PDF version here.
Comments
Wow, that is a busy igoogle page!
> that include the work and voice of others as readily as a my own critical reflection and scholarly work<
This is intriguing to me – it sounds almost more like a personal learning network perhaps in some ways then – as if the PLE has rhizomed out (new word) to incorporate (possibly collaborative) networks.
I find it utterly fascinating that the take home message for you about PLEs (things I think that are often posited as very individual-centric) is about making more of communicating and networking. I wonder if this part of a more holistic take on what the learner experience is? i.e. not just the learner engaged with subject matter, but with a process and in context in relation to other actors and social practices?
p.s. great diagram!
Hmm ... this individual vs collective is still a hard nut to crack for me. This is the liminal space I'm swimming in right now, trying to figure out what is what. Part of me is happy with the ways I'm learning and these are very individualistic ways - this is goining deeper and deeper. Part of me thinks I could get engaged more in the networking and sharing - that would be more in horizontal directions - as 1. I would learn more (being given and giving, you learn best by teaching), 2. I would gain some status in the community which could increase my respectability and employability and we all want to be recognised and appreciated, blah, blah ... aren't I back to square one? It's again about me! ;-)
And there is this other part of me who would love to say 'to hell with all this' and go hiking in the mountains.
I've used iGoogle for two or three years now - I've prettied it up for the presentation purposes (mainly by playing around with the themes) - I don't really read all these blogs but sometimes even a glance at the particular page allows to fish out some gem. For me the browser toolbar is also important which gives me quick access to communication tools and the most important websites, including iGoogle.