PLE (Personal Learning Environment) is a concept that has caught a lot of attention lately. Essentially a PLE is a collection of dynamically growing resources that are personal or relevant to an individual learner.
Given the exponentially increasing volume of virtual places of learning (blogs, wikis et al) and conversations, it is extremely easy for a learner to spend enormous time in locating the right learning and get completely lost in a forest of endless clicks and irrelevant information. I end up doing that a lot (piecing together learning from a host of virtual learning places, sort of becoming an instructional designer myself) and it is going to get worse.
Cut back to PLEs. Let us say I managed to slice through everything in my PLE and gathered relevant information (posts, entries, discussions etc) around a specific learning area. Then, suppose I had the tools to order and sequence that information into a flow that seems intelligible to me. Then, suppose I somehow managed to add supporting information of my own that I would think people would benefit from (maybe a short quiz or an introduction).
Then I sent all that out to my community and said, why don’t you help me refine this…I would like to share my learning experience with others who may have a similar learning style? Suppose, through a process of soft peer reviews, I was able to improve on what I did. At the end, I could then submit the peer reviewed learning material (my shared PLE slice) to the community and let the community rate it.
Suppose you wanted to learn about that particular area. You would go to the virtual learning place, search and find a large number of these shared PLEs with different community ratings. You could pick the one you like the most (i.e. find the most intelligible), import that slice into your own PLE (just like importing a SCORM based course into an LMS maybe, though I know people will dislike that analogy!) and maybe even rate it when you complete.
Thank you for adding a lesson on a very important learning concept. The University of Manitoba has developed a wiki on learning and PLE. Since the wiki is a work in progress, you may wish to join me and others to add your contributions. Here are few definitions of PLE from the Manitoba wiki.
Hi Michelle,
Learnhub provides the ability to author content and have the community review it. At present, it is geared to be a potential content source for a PLE, but not a PLE in in itself. The way it could become one is if it allows many other external sources of learning to get integrated, tagged categorizations (multiple views of content), some tools to manage all the learning sources and tools for constructing “lessons” or learning paths. These are some basic capabilities that a PLE would need to have in my opinion. Learnhub could potentially evolve in that direction.
Thanks, Viplav
Is it ok if i consider my diigo bookmarks (similar to del.icio.us), with all the features it now has, as part of my PLE? I register most everything i consider noteworthy during my surfing, tag it, and leave comments on most of my bookmarks.
There, i have created a couple of groups that other people have joined and contributed to, as well as joined groups of shared interests, thus enriching considerably my learning and access to noteworthy links…
Is that enough? What does a PLE look like? (screenshots?)
Yes, absolutely. Your Diigo bookmarks be part of your PLE. The way I look at it, a PLE is an ever expanding resource – limited only by your thirst for knowledge, social interaction and learning. Take a look at Ray Sim’s PLE at http://simslearningconnections.com/ple/ray_ple.html.
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