What are your thoughts on PLEs?

Hello everyone. I am teaching a course on Tech in the Curriculum and PLEs are one of the tools I am introducing. Does anyone have any experience with PLEs? Have you used them students? What are your thoughts about them? My students and I would love any feedback you have to offer!

Tags: PLE, curriculum, personal-learning-environment

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Permalink Reply by nlowell on February 3, 2008 at 6:33pm

I have/use what I consider my PLE.

Before I tell you what I use, a disclaimer. A PLE is - first - PERSONAL. I use the tools I find useful to support my learning. It includes tools that introduce new ideas, tools that provide channels for investigation, and tools that aid my cognitive construction. My particular PLE doest not include tools that connect me to any particular "educational" content at the moment, altho it's flexible enough that I could certainly add that in. I'm emphasizing that point because my PLE supports *my* learning ... not some institution's ideas and ideals of education.

With that disclaimer,

I use a desktop aggregator to link in about 400-500 text based feeds. They're categorized into groups that are meaningful to me. I follow specific people/sources in my feeds to search for ideas and to keep the flow of new concepts coming. This is also important in idea development because it gives me insight into what other people are thinking and discovering.

I use blogs. More than one. Some have my name prominently affixed. Some are anonymous. Some relate to specific topic areas. Some relate to specific purposes. They all help me learn what I think and to make connections by giving me a place to write the ideas down. I do this in the open, trusting the community to provide correction when I stray.

I use google, yahoo, wikipedia, and a variety of other tools to investigate ideas as they come in on my network. Sometimes I can dismiss them quickly. Sometimes I spend a lot of time playing with the ideas, seeing what other people think, and how other ideas might connect.

That's it. It's a simple environment, but it permits me to gather new ideas, to expand on old ideas, to investigate ideas that come my way, and to assess how much (or little) I'm actually learning.