PLEs - General
From JITT
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
Dimensions
There are many dimensions to a space of PLEs. These will eventually be fully discussed on this page.
One basic distinction is between those visions , or incarnations, of PLEs as pure Web 2.0 artefacts, and those running on local hardware, be that anything from a laptop to a handheld. In the latter incarnation a further distinction is between those PLEs connected to the web, and those operating offline, perhaps in a field environment or a wi-fi free hospital. Off-line usage without connecting back to the web would be possible, but would be an incredibly impovrishing use, since the common conception of a PLE is that it is to be used in pedagogic contexts that acknowledge (or even emphasise) the role of communication in learning.
To be continued...
Discussion
Its interesting to note a similarlity between developing ideas of PLEs and characteristics of information ecologies (click through possibly twice to get full sized picture):
Form George Siemens Microlearning 2006 presentation, see http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/archives/002499.html.
To be continued...
Changes in teaching and learning methods
For PLEs to be most usefully used there needs to be a general shift in teaching and learning methods. The post below usefully summarises this.
Marco Polo, The Inevitable Personal Learning Environment Post at incorporated subversion, http://autonolearner.blogspot.com/2006/01/inevitable-personal-learning.html 11 Jan 2006
While other entries on these PLE pages are in chronological order I've moved this into the general section because it illustrates a useful point, that PLEs in their full and their least institutional incarnation can ony emerge with a profound changes in pedagogic practice:
"I'm ... listening again to Dave Warlick's podcast Web 2.0 at the NCETC. I'm learning a lot from this, and I like Dave's provocative questions. Of course, one of the topics that comes up (about 30minutes in) is curriculum and textbooks: if the textbook is outdated even before students open it on the first day...David asks, what if instead of buying a textbook, a teacher subscribed to various digital sources of information that helps students learn what they're supposed to be learning?
Well, the next question, obviously, is, who is deciding what students are supposed to be learning? After all, textbooks belong to the age of the teacher as authority figure - the "I know what's best for you and here it is" figure. But if the teacher is now a kind of human aggregator, helping to locate sources of information for students, and now helping them more with the task of making sense of the information, of digesting it, and re-mixing it for their own learning purposes, then that rather changes the picture."
Elsewhere there may, of course, be a role for other incarnations of PLEs that do not implement that vision of learning by making meaning of found, agregated, and mixed information.
Another useful warning to consider is that of institutional resistance *todo*
