Tek4L

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?

http://wwwu.uni-klu.ac.at/wgreller/wordpress/?p=109

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.

Still on the topic of PLEs - an interesting read from Mike Malloch
. Among other things he states “let’s be very careful to learn from the simplicity, clarity, user-centricity, restraint and attention to detail that characterise web2.0.” and “There are some wonderful applications, services and mash-ups out there,
but existing services and applications are not quite enough to support
the features we can envisage learners having access to in a PLE. Only
by determined experimentation can we begin to characterise and address
the gaps.”

My concern though is that all this detailed observation and experimentation to try and evolve a PLE will in fact change the state of web 2.0 for the learner, and that we will never know what sort of a learner centred environment may have evolved if we had been able to resist the urge to open the box and look into it

Don�t start with the institutions � the issues become very complex and a PLE initiative/project will quickly drown

Stephen Powell: Personal Learning Environments experts meeting

I have to agree with Stephen on this point. This has happened with eportfolios - they are largley being looked at from the institutional perspective, and in most cases the possibility for creativity, lifelong learning, etc. that a portfolio presents is sucked out and replaced by a set of rigid assessment parameters, and the eportfolio becomes nothing more than a form filling exercise.

If the same thing happens with the PLE concept, then it will move from that wonderful free and organic concept of each person cobbling together the things that work for them at any particular time, a browser here, a newsreader there, a little bit of flickr, a little bit of flock, some blogger thrown in for good measure, and will be turned into some bloated application that students have to download, or log into weekly, and enter all the correct information in, in the correct week, and then submit a dump file, or screen shot of it at the end of the course for assessment to show that they have been learning in their personal environment in the way the institution wanted them to