Prompted by, although not directly a reply to, Donald Clark’s Why I love PLEs and hate VLEs (or LMSs)…
Personally, I want to keep some distance between my own PLE (previously described here) and things like my personal calendar (“let’s see is it my turn to pick-up our son from pre-school?”), ‘to do’ list (“I really do need to get that oil changed on the car”), stock portfolio, general email, etc.
I want this distance from my “personal doing environment” to both encourage more long-term development oriented intention (in sense of purpose and focus) and reflection in my learning.
I’m seeing something like this:
This brings me back to the Cappuccino U meme that passed through the learning community early this winter; for example, with Harold Jarche here and Jay Cross here. Even though I increasingly interact with all three environments mentioned above at a single physical desk and computer at my home, I’m more productive in all three if I keep them as distinct (but loosely coupled) environments within my computer desktop. I already do this in some fashion using SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop “cube” functionality where I have the various environments in action across three different sides of my desktop cube.
I think loosely coupled provides flexibility, but for those who aren’t tech literate it’s bitsy and breakable. Getting stuff out of VLEs and closed working environments easily remains a barrier.
Here is my take on the future of PLEs a while back.
Ron,
Thanks for the pointer to your work. I found it very useful.
Ray
Way before the days of WiFi my colleague and I would take ourselves off to the nearest cafe and sit for hours collaborating on various projects. We called this ‘latte analysis’. Our tools, a notebook and pen. Surprisingly even with the hubub of life around us, this environment was really conducive to our productivity and creativity. Today with laptop and wifi I can retreat much further afield of my physical workspace.
I agree, my PLE includes all three environments and I regularly have to access these simultaneously to figure things out.