PLE (Personal Learning Environment)
PLNs and PLEs - It's the 'Personal' bit that counts the most
A discussion of what the terms Personal Leaning Networks and Personal Learning Enviroments mean and why they are such effective tools for educators professional development by Graham Stanley.
I was writing a comment on an interesting blog post by Cecilia Lemos about what having a PLN has done for her, when I realised that this comment deserved to be expanded a blog post of its own, so here it is!
For some time now, I've been concerned about how some people are using this term, which stands for 'Personal Learning Network' and which developed out of the concept of PLE (Personal Learning Environment).
Shelly Terrell has said she prefers the term 'Passionate Learning Networks and others refer to Professional Learning Networks, but for me, the whole point about the term is that it's 'personal'.
The term PLN is bandied about so much these days it's starting to lose its meaning. Another thing I hear a lot now is people talking about 'the PLN' , which is fine when people are referring to 'their' PLN, but not if they have a big social club in mind that people are either part of or not. This is not a PLN. A PLN is something people have to build and which takes time to nurture and develop. It is also and involves active participation and hard work. It's not just about pressing a button and joining a Ning.
Where did the term PLN come from? You can find a great discussion about this on a blog post by Alec Couros, but I'll also share what I have come to understand about the differences here.
First of all there was the idea of PLE (Personal Learning Environment), which was a reaction to the VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) represented by platforms such as Blackboard or Moodle. The VLE is all very well, but the big problem with it is that it is usually institution owned. You join when you are a student or employee of an organisation or institution and then when you leave (because you change jobs or stop studying at a particular university, etc) then you will probably have to leave the VLE. This usually means losing all of the learning content you have contributed and becoming divorced from the people you have connected with. Not ideal as it means you have to start all over again somewhere else.
A PLE, on the other hand is owned by the teacher or student and is all about 'small pieces loosely joined' (i.e. a collection of tools that work for you. Soon after the popularisation of the PLE, people started to realise that it wasn't about the tools (i.e. the environment) it's about the people you choose to connect to to enable learning to occur (i.e. your network). So, the idea of a PLN was born, and by all accounts we have David Warlick to thank for this.
Perversely, I have subsequently seen organisations trying to hijack the popularity of the term PLN and use it for what really is a VLE - I went to one presentation at a conference where the presenter talked about how her university was building a 'PLN system' to help their students - what they were in fact doing was building another VLE (i.e. a learning environment that was owned by the university) - bizarre,and totally missing the point!
The benefits a teacher can gain by building a PLN and how best to do it are the reasons why a group of us have started the aPLaNet project - to raise awareness of what this can do for teachers who are reluctant or who don't know how to begin. If you think you can help us by becoming a mentor to new teachers or you are a teacher that would like to build your own PLN, then please join us here: http://aplanet-project.org.
This blog post was originally published on http://blog-efl.blogspot.com
Responsive Open Learning Environments
ROLE’s cross-disciplinary innovative approaches deliver and test prototypes of highly responsive digital learning environments, offering breakthrough levels of effectiveness, flexibility, user-control and individualisation. ROLE follows an open approach thereby offering all interested parties to participate in this major endeavour.
ROLE’s stakeholders range from learners to teachers, from employers to education service providers and learning material vendors, from university to further-education organisations. Their needs are continuously integrated into ROLE, thereby ensuring that significant benefits arise for the learners, their communities, employers, TEL developers and society in general.
Learning is a highly individual experience. Therefore, ROLE enables learners to create and their personal learning environment, and thus their individual learning experience. The ROLE approach offers adaptivity and personalisation specifically in terms of the contents and services that comprise the entire learning environment and its functionalities. This approach permits individualisation of the components, tools, and functionalities of a digital learning environment. Learning environment services can be combined to generate (to mashup) new components and functionalities while addressing the needs of the learners as well as of the organisations accrediting and/or certifying the learning activities. This approach empowers learners themselves to generate new tools and functionalities according to their needs, and can help them to establish a livelier and personally more meaningful learning context and learning experience. At the same time, organisations are able to control and stir the assembly of the learning environments to ensure the acceptability of the learning activities and outcomes.
First results are available through the ROLE showcase, available at http://www.role-showcase.eu/ . Here, successful tools and learning environments are provided to exemplify how ROLE can be successfully employed in all stages of life-long learning after leaving high school. Furthermore, learners, teachers and organisations testify about their successful use of the ROLE approach in various learning scenarios. ROLE’s generic framework uses an open source approach, interoperable across software systems and technology. Hence, any tool created by an individual is available from a pool of services and tools to all learners via the internet, no matter which learning environment, operating system or device they use or subject matter they learn. A highly active community is continuously promoting new results, ideas and approaches. Join us at the LinkedIn ROLE group: http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/1590487
Extracted from ROLE
Didactic architectures and organization models: a process of mutual adaptation
In a knowledge society where time to market is fast and competence domains are widened and in rapid evolution, organizations are forced to move towards the so called enterprise 2.0 model, characterized by an intensive use of blogs, wikis, social bookmarking and RSS. These organizations have a flat structure and are based on the principle of autonomy. This article asserts that in these contexts, training and vocational systems based on the same principles - namely autonomy, informal style and an open approach - can be implemented. In other more traditional frameworks, formal eLearning based on LMS platforms will continue to represent an effective solution: as long as users do not become familiar with the functionalities offered by 2.0 technologies and thus become actors of change.
The document is structured in three parts: The first chapter analyses four different didactic architectures, highlighting the differences between eLearning 1.0 and eLearning 2.0; the second chapter describes organizational models and introduces the relation with the didactic architectures, and the third chapter highlights the process of mutual adaptation between didactic architectures and organization models.