Sims Learning Connections

Tonight I’m making an effort to begin to catch-up on my writing after a couple of weeks of attending to life’s other priorities…

Prompted by Alan Levine’s TLA, Ergo Sum and Jay Cross’s PLEase.

My mental model of the moment for Personal Learning Environments (PLE, or perhaps, reference, I really mean personal learning environment? Actually, I believe this model largely applies for either even if one cares to make the distinction)…

21 April update: For simplicity the diagram doesn’t show content repository resources that are not directly within an individual’s PLE. For example, links to a database icon that represents (say) MIT’s OpenCourseWare. In the diagram I focus on the peer-to-peer aspects only to set-up the references in the second half of this post.     

To echo Jay’s “isn’t quite right” — I do see each person’s personal learning environment to be very personal AND also part of the larger whole as Jay suggests. PLE are very personal both in the sense of being independent of the university or employer and in the sense of being hand-crafted — although a bit necessarily too hand-crafted today. Even with a more ideal integrative application, PLE will still be highly customized to the needs and preferences of the learner. Portions of even the software application PLE will be kept behind our personal firewall. Learning is deeply personal, AND social. One’s social network and tagging (folksonomy) exist due to one’s own (personal) connections and actions. The label Personal does serve well and is common with Personal Knowledge Management that I take as a near synonym for PLE (reference my earlier writing.)

I agree with Jay relative to:

The tools you learn with become the tools you work with. Why create something that makes it easier to connect with other people and the web, only to throw it away upon graduation?

AND, I do see the utility of some separation, while using the same foundational tools, as I discussed in PLE as Retreat. What I am reaching for is an optimized environment for Learning AND a loosely-couple optimized environment for Doing.

Regarding “Environment,” Jay says: “The environment is the web, the workplace, home, or your playground: the Learnscape.” Similarly Alan says: “my definition of a PLE is the Internet.” We have many scales of environment. From my desktop environment to Gaia herself. I very much do want to create a PLE and personal learning environment that is smaller than the entire internet. I want to make it both cozy, inviting, comprehendable, AND yet comprehensive for my domain of interest.

Back to the drawing above, I see the opportunity for Learning Communities to facilate some common toolsets where the community members have an easy-to-get-started-with PLE that easily integrates with others in the same learning community, while also are connected to others outside the community. These PLE-enabled learning communities could be affiliated with an University or Corporation, or explicitly created for learning (e.g. TwoBrains), or more DIY (Do It Yourself) amongst a group of individuals that wish to come together in learning.

This brings me closer to where I believe Stephen Downes and others are already (Ray still playing catch-up.) As Stephen says in his Edu_RSS 0.2 introduction:

The idea behind Edu_RSS is to view the web as a community of communities, rather than as a single, undifferentiated mass. It allows you to select and highlight commentary from people who are close to you, who are interested in the same things as you, rather than from people across the web.

Connect this thought with some recent writing by D’Arcy Norman:

What if EduGlu was nothing more than an organic directory, where people (faculty, students, general public, etc…) are able to create folders and place links to their various locations of their own online publishing. People can create multiple groups/folders for various contexts, and add whatever relevant links they want to in each one. The directory takes care of listing the groups/folders, displaying their contents, and generating OPML containing machine-readable versions of these lists so people can then subscribe to them in their own aggregator(s). Import the OPML into Google Reader. Subscribe to it as a Reading List in BlogBridge. Import it into Bloglines, NetNewsWire, Sage, FeedOnFeeds, etc… Wherever you’re happiest. EduGlu isn’t about aggregating the ITEMS into one place, it’s about individuals sharing their content easily. Which is done more effectively as a directory, rather than an aggregator.

and in Scott Wilson’s pointer to D’arcy:

It’s an interesting approach that fits well with the general concept of “institutional repository”, although it turns the concept inside out – the registry hosts feeds, not content objects – the objects continue to live where the user publishes them, requiring various kinds of personal repositories. I think its the kind of application that will provide the services that students and staff will be able to connect their PLE with – connecting, not replacing, personal technology.

And close for now with Peter Hale’s original writing that could just as well have been a reply to the above:

The aim of this is to connect all the research that each person has done with research of others. This enables each person to connect with work they would like to have done themselves or can see they should have done, or should get involved in, but haven’t had time. This can help business by allowing the business to clarify what it should focus on while knowing who can provide the other services it needs.