PLEs - 2004

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This page and other PLE pages in this wiki (reach them from Personal Learning Environments) have been constructed and are maintained by Mark van Harmelen. Feedback and suggestions for additions are most welcome. Contact Mark as mark -a-t- cs . man . ac . uk

JISC Personal Learning Environment session notes JISC/CETIS conference 2004, http://www.elearning.ac.uk/resources/PLEsessionnotes.doc/view 4 November 2004

In the brief notes of the Personal Learning Environments session held at the JISC/CETIS conference in Oxford in November 2004, the two projects that are identifiable as PLEs are Colloquia (see PLEs -2000) and the Interactive Logbook.

At this point of time the interactive logbook is a client (on what?) that connects to services. Details are scant. It appears to be in the middle of being rewritten with JISC funding after having been a buggy student project. The project publishes more results in 2005, see PLEs - 2005.

Oleg Liber, Sharon Perry, Phil Beauvoir, John Swannie, Tom Franklin, Sarah Davies, Dan Corlett, Hugh Davies, Sandy Patrick Carmichael, Sandy Leaton-Gray, Michael Sellway, Rob Crouchley, Rob Allan, Adrian Fish, Christina Smart, Maia Dimitrova, Marcello Allegri, Charles Severance, and Wilbert Kraan, Report out from Personal Learning and Research Environments JISC/CETIS conference 2004, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/Personal%20Learning%20ppt.ppt 4 November 2004

Report back to conference, proposed "Move from a provider or institution focused set of capabilities to an environment where users “assemble” their environment to suit their needs", merging of facilities for different communities (learning, research, IE professionals) into a Personal/Learning Research Environment. With hindsight, includes a partially-wrong prediction of someday the PLRE will not be browser-based.

James Farmer, Communication dynamics: Discussion boards, weblogs and the development of communities of inquiry in online learning environments, http://incsub.org/blog/index.php?p=3 5 October 2004

See also the related paper at ASCILITE 2004, 5-8 December 2004.

If one takes a social constructivist view then the following is of note, and has profound implications for the community behaviour that PLEs must support, and for the consequent functionality of PLEs: "Developing on social constructivist perspectives, in specific reference to the online environment, Garrison and Anderson in their 2003 publication E-Learning in the 21st Century: A Framework for Research and Practice put forward that “a community of learners is an essential, core element of an educational experience when higher order learning is the desired learning outcome” (p 22) and that “the idealized view of higher education, as a critical community of learners, is no longer just an ideal, but has become a practical necessity in the realization of relevant, meaningful and continuous learning” "

Farmer proceeds from a set of elements with particular relevance to PLEs: "To set about an examination the author has taken as a guide the framework for research and practice set out by Garrison and Anderson (2003) for achieving a successful community of inquiry composed of “teachers and students transacting with the specific purpose of facilitating, constructing and validating understanding, and of developing capabilities that will lead to further learning” (p. 23). This framework states that three key elements of any community of inquiry are cognitive presence, social presence and teacher presence, and each must be considered when evaluating an e-learning experience.

To apply this model to an OLE, it is necessary to consider to what degree the environment itself, and any inherent principles contained within its design, facilitates or obstructs the development of social, cognitive and teaching presence. As will be argued, the degree to which each of these can be achieved is dependent to a large degree on the communication tools within an OLE.

Social presence: Social presence is defined by Garrison, Anderson and Archer as “the ability of participants in a community of inquiry to project themselves socially and emotionally, as “real” people (i.e. their full personality), through the medium of communication being used” (2000 p. 94). Social presence is perhaps the most obvious of elements to be influenced by the medium through which learners communicate (in this case the OLE).

Cognitive presence: Garrison, Anderson and Archer describe cognitive presence as “the extent to which learners are able to construct and confirm meaning through sustained reflection and discourse in a critical community of inquiry” (2001 p. 11) and in essence an OLE could be seen to facilitate this in the degree to which it can support “sustained reflection and discourse” and also through any constraints or opportunities presented by the system which hinder or enable a learner in their attempts to “construct and confirm meaning”. In many ways this is the defining element of the educational experience and is impacted on most by the nature of discourse encouraged through an OLE.

Teaching presence: Anderson et al. (2001) view teaching presence as “the design, facilitation and direction of cognitive and social processes for the purpose of realizing personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile learning outcomes”. In terms of OLE use, this can be assessed by the extent and degree to which the tools available empower the teacher to impact on the learner and learning environment and whether the teacher is able to design, facilitate and direct the learning experience towards “educationally worthwhile learning outcomes”."

Garrison, R. & Anderson, T. (2003). E-Learning in the 21st Century: A framework for research and practice. Routledge
Other refs not given.

George Siemens Learning Management Systems: The wrong place to start learning, http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/lms.htm 22 Nov 2004

This post doesn't mention PLEs by name but discusses many of their characteristics and Web 2.0 components. In conclusion:

'The very notion of “managing learning” conflicts with how people are actually learning today. Outside of primary and secondary school, most of our learning falls into the “topping up what we know” category. As a result, we need tools that allow for rapid creation and breakdown. Searching Google, blogs, and wikis has a very quick learning structure creation and breakdown. An LMS has a long creation/breakdown process (and once the learning structure has been broken down (i.e. end of course), it is no longer accessible to learners). LMS' still view learners as canisters to be filled with content – this is particularly relevant in light of the heavy emphasis on object repositories for learning. Essentially, most LMS platforms are attempting to shape the future of learning to fit into the structure of their systems, even though most learning today is informal and connectionist in nature.'

George Siemens, Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age, http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm 12 December, 2004

PLEs - 2004

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