Sims Learning Connections

Prompted by Mark van Harmelen‘s Sixth IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT’06) paper titled Personal Learning Environments along with my Framework for PLE in Corporations and the diagram in my AND AND AND… post.

The IEEE paper provides a very useful classification of Personal Learning Environments (PLE) along the following dimensions:

1. Pedagogy, Personalisation, Control:
   • Pedagogic approach
   • Non-collaborative / collaborative
   • Closed / open
   • Fixed /personalisable
   • Locus of control
2. Connectivity and Compatibility:
   • Single / multiple institution connectivity
   • Server / hybrid / peer-to-peer based
   • Online usage only / online and offline usage
   • Plugability
   • Package compatibility
   • Application compatibility
3. Platform:
   • Heavy-weight platform / light-weight platform

This framework will be helpful in structuring definitional conversations such as the recent What is a Personal Learning Environment? from the University of Manitoba’s Learning Technology Centre — moving from “it is this,” “no, it is that” to “my context and assumptions for PLE are the following, using values along Mark van Harmelen’s dimensions.”

To the above PLE-centric classification, I now bring in the learner and their goals to provide a complementary user-centric classification:

1. Role and employment status, for example:
   1. corporate citizen
   2. sole proprietorship or life-long learner pursuing learning outside of the corporation context
   3. pre-secondary education student
   4. undergraduate university student
   5. graduate university student, researcher, and faculty
2. (non-orthogonal to #1 immediately above and also overlapping with Mark van Harmelen’s ‘Non-collaborative / collaborative’) Collaborative context, for example:
   1. An individual creating their own learning network and not explicitly connecting their personal learning environments with other’s personal learning environments (or PLEs)
   2. As in the AND AND AND… diagram, explicitly linking PLEs; presumably to pursue shared learning goals
   3. Also in the diagram, collaboration within an explicit learning community that shares software resources
3. Learning goal, for example:
   1. Short-term (tactical) narrowly defined knowledge or skill need, e.g. learning a new software language
   2. Long-term (strategic) broadly defined competency need, e.g. becoming a better software developer
4. Learning Style — I’ll leave this one to imagination as any examples will likely bring me into the murkiness summarized in Jay Cross’s December 2005 post.
5. Computer experience, technical aptitude and availability of technical support, for example:
   1. The non-technical individual doing this on their own
   2. The modestly technical that has access to some more technical support
   3. The technical (geek, hacker) individual

The learner and their goals then dictate the possible or desirable PLE.

End-note: regarding “to LMS/VLE or not to LMS/VLE with PLE?” — a topic I intend to come back to in a future post — the above suggests how the answer to this question could differ within an university context versus a corporate context. Observation: the majority of recent personal learning environment writing has come from those most strongly grounded in the university context. In contrast, I come from a corporate context so my (sometimes unconscious) assumptions about the “what is so” may differ. Lastly, this again reminds me of my personal ‘action list’ item to further dig into earlier Personal Knowledge Management writing, which emerged more from the corporate context.

Bit by bit, it is all coming together.