I’ve been pondering the nature of PLEs a little more of late, and as I gear up to investigate how one could go about supporting PLEs in an organisational setting which needs some form of assessment, I seem to run into a few problems before I can even get to the (hairy) assessment one. It seems that many organisations and institutions aren’t quite satisfied with the benefits they can gain from a learner’s PLE, they want to own it too.
I’m going to put my learning anarchy hat on here and say quite definitively in terms of organisational ownership “by definition, you cannot own someone’s PLE”. When considering a PLE as :
“a tool that allows for a learner (or anyone) to engage in a distributed environment consisting of a network of people, services and resources” (Downes 2006, p23)
it doesn’t seem quite right. I think that some vendors and organisations take the “tool” thing a bit too literally and think they can build some fantastic portal, aggregator thing, supported through the institution’s infrastructure and call it a PLE, but they can’t. They can build a fantastic portal, aggregator thing… and that’s really it because such a tool is:
- not owned by the learner, but the institution
- only takes into account the online component of a PLE, this is described as the Personal Web by Stephen Wheeler
- assumes that all components of the online PLE will fit into this portal thing (something as simple as a password protected Ning foils this)
- is organised according to the needs of the organisation first and foremost (I don’t care what skin you can apply or what modules can be shown or selected, it is still defined by the system’s infrastructure, which is defined by the organisation)
If the PLE is considered as a tool a little more metaphorically, in that the PLE is the tool, and that tool is the distributed environment Downes describes, it gains its own unique shape through the interactions of the learner, growing and shrinking according to their will, extending nodes where they want them to be. If looking at it that way, the architecture of the PLE is owned and formed by the learner, and the PLE becomes
a tool that complements the ideal of lifelong learning, acting as an enabler of both formal and informal learning, for institutional or personal objectives, transforming over time to meet ever changing objectives.
This “thing” an institution owns is probably more like a Virtual Learning Environment, a Community of Practice, or more skeptically an LMS with some bells and whistles. While it may be a tool that holds much pedagogical value (and I really do earnestly believe in the value of such tools infact, I am Mollybob the online community manager/facilitator when not being a student on this blog), it is but a part of a bigger picture and, by definition, can never be a Personal Learning Environment.
So a PLE is more of an idea than a thing?
A strategy more than a product?
Is it an amorphous entity that is comprised of the various tools, resources and practices implemented by the learner as they learn rather than a specific technology? It grows by evolution rather than by design?
So how do you learn how to build one? Or is it implicit in its existence rather than explicit?
It’s not a tangible thing, but it made up of an everchanging array of tools and relationships. It has to be made by the individual as they need to have a tacit understanding of it. It doesn’t exist in one place, but over many. I’d try to use the analogy of a bowerbird building a nest – it picks things up from everywhere that look good, it doesn’t check into a nest hotel to sit on something pre-fabricated until it doesn’t need it anymore.
I had a go at suggesting how one might form through people you’re more famililar with, but that doesn’t have to be the only way, you could follow a bunch of people on twitter who seem interesting and see where it goes too. The key is that over time, the network forms through strong and weak ties – I made the model for my eLearning design assignment here http://mollybob.wordpress.com/the-ple-growth-model/
Does this help?
I like this. The lock stepping thus causes is a real problem. As this who have attained status are finding that their lack of understanding and denial Is just too challenging. The desire to be informed and inform requires then to participate in a new process. In effect starting over, learning about new connections with shared reality. Don’t worry too much the metaverse has a glass ceiling. It’s called exams and qualifications. The problem is that the terms by which people are measured are changing
We do need to assess student activity. This is evil, but for educators, it’s a necessary evil. The problem is shoehorning new types of educational activity such as PLE development into old forms of assessment. And that’s where institutional accreditation/validation becomes a problem.
I like this and agree-it’s pretty much what I had in mind in the points I tried to make in the vle debate at Altc – that despite the good things about a PLE, it’s really no business of an institution, except to ensure the vle and other infrastructure supports and enables learners (and educators) to build their PLEs.
That said, most people would not know how to build an effective PLE and so helping learners develop the skills and awareness for this could certainly see a role for educators, although they may not be best placed to build the technical skills and awareness (eg security) aspects – so a partnership with learning technologists and ‘hard IT’ staff to develop the skills/awareness along with the pedagogical and subject skills might be the ideal?
In that context, (and contradicting myself) perhaps there is a role for institutions to provide and ‘off the shelf suggested starting framework’ of a PLE, eg an amalgam of tools, templates and guides for their use which could introduce the concepts, opportunities and benefits of such an approach without being proscriptive or overly directive?