Is the PLE an application
Following on from my previous posts about PLEs (June 15 2006 and June 20 2006) I see Wolfgang Greller and Stephen Downes are both questioning if the PLE needs to be an application:
The question therefore is: If learners are totally capable of blending various environments together, be it flickr, VLEs, messaging tools, mobile phones, television, etc., why would we want some middleware to do just that?
Stephen adds
What, indeed, is the value-add of the PLE?
http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=37442
he has moved his blog so link was not working at last check
It seem to me that the value add is for the education technologist and institutions, not the learners. The only reason a PLE has to be an application is so ed tech geeks can apply for lots of funding to develop it, and so institutions have an easy way to ‘manage’ and ‘assess’ all of the learning that is now taking place outside their learning management systems.