viernes, 21 de agosto de 2009

The present and future of Personal Learning Environments (PLE)

Artículo escrito por Ron Lubensky en diciembre de 2006
Deliberations
Reflecting on learning and deliberating about democracy

2 comentarios:

María Cecilia Fonseca Sardi dijo...

"The following definition is intended to introduce the general nature of PLEs:

a Personal Learning Environment is a facility for an individual to access, aggregate, configure and manipulate digital artefacts of their ongoing learning experiences."

María Cecilia Fonseca Sardi dijo...

This definition captures the following salient aspects, which seem to be common across all current viewpoints:

1. PLEs are effectively controlled by the individual, thus decoupled from institutional portals like university Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) or workplace Learning Management Systems (LMS) for which the design goals are in response to institutional requirements.

2. The artefacts operated upon through PLEs include the digital resources and references with which individuals wish to engage presently and perhaps recall in the future. Resources include not only static text and media but also dynamic services and their artefacts, such as instant messaging, online forum and weblog conversations. Whereas an ePortfolio contains actual assets for the purpose of reflection, assessment or self-promotion, the PLE includes a broader repository that also includes links and commentary for all three purposes.

3. The primary goal of a PLE for an individual is to bring all the disparate artefacts of interest for learning under a single operating roof. The presumption is that there are many artefacts, organising them is time-consuming and it's easy to forget about or lose them. PLEs are meant to simplify managing these artefacts, creating meaning through aggregation, linking and metadata tagging (eg comments, keywords).

4. A PLE integrates with the digital services to which the individual currently subscribes. These could be the university VLE, the workplace LMS or a collection of so-called Web 2.0 services like social bookmarking or photo sharing.

5. A PLE spans the various learning experiences to which an individual subscribes throughout life. High school students may begin to operate their own PLE, hooking it into their school's VLE. Upon university entrance, it could be connected to the university VLE. If entering professional practice, the individual could then link the PLE to workplace learning and professional development facilities. All the while, the individual may wish to link selectively to an evolving parade of Web 2.0 services which are found to be useful for enabling personal growth and learning.



PLE Venn diagram

This diagram shows how PLEs are situated at the intersection of VLEs, Web 2.0 and an expanded view of ePortfolios.