In my Friday post on Personal KM and Learning Ecosystems I casually mention how Jay Cross used the term “Personal Learning Environments” and how I saw advantage over the terminology I grew up with: Personal KM.
Little did I know how much Personal Learning Environment (sigh, if you really must, then ‘PLE’) had legs under it. Today, as I got around to Googling the term, I had one of those “surely, I’ve been living under a rock” moments. Or looking outward versus inward…again illustrating how our industry, and industry in general, just loves to invent new terms that then get in the way of efficient discourse.
Okay, I’m on-board now and will change my category name to Personal Learning Environment.
In my brief research so far, one of the better introductions is from Graham Attwell with his September 2006 piece: Personal Learning Environments – Live at Edinburgh. Credit to Federica Oradini’s blog for providing me with the pointer to this as well as the heavy reading CETIS PLE report.
The connection that I am now making is back to a question I posed during the closing Extreme Learning session: how do we (do we?) in the corporate learning profession encourage, nah inspire, employees to become extreme learners? I’m thinking that mapping one’s own Personal Learning Environment could be a motivator to increasing commitment to what Elliott coins extreme learning. I’m envisioning a pre-work exercise to have classroom participants map their own personal learning environments and then share and discuss them during class…with objective of not only increasing learning motivation, but learning how to strengthen own PLE via borrowing ideas from others, plus the bonus of internalizing and respecting differences in learning styles.
Or, perhaps we just start this as another learning profession meme as done with the five things meme that flew through the community in December? (I link to Dave Cormier here as he appears to be the one to infect those that I read, i.e. Harold Jarche). I’ll get mine done first.
Photo credit: jeroen ven
I´d like to share with you my thoughts on PLE.
http://mohamedaminechatti.blogspot.com/2007/01/towards-personal-learning-environment.html
Looking forward to a short feedback.
Hello Mohamed,
Thanks for sharing the pointer to your writing. I believe you have it correct as far as the software application portion.
For me, “personal learning environment” then also extends beyond what is software. For example, my writing desk in my home office, the color of the walls in my home office, the conversations that I have with my mother who is a educator of 40 or more years — where the only technology is the telephone.
For the software portion, I believe that one of the keys is to facilitate not only configuring our “PLE” to our own lifestyle and preferences, but also efficiently sharing that “PLE” and the nodes it links out to with others with similar interests.
Thanks again. More to come.