Personal Learning Resources

Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) are made up of more than web tools. People and non-digital resources are also important components. My Personal Learning Network is essentially the people I connect with in order to learn what I need when I need it. Twitter, Facebook and other social networking tools are simply the means through which I do it. But as I have tried to articulate in earlier blogposts, my PLE is more than people and tools. The picture to the left shows some of the books I have collected together within my Personal Learning Resources (PLRs) and demonstrates that I don't rely completely on digital media to learn within my information society. They are a sample of the text books I have chosen to study because they are the ones that inform me the best within my own community of interest.

It is said that you can tell a lot about a person by looking at the books they have on their shelves. Well, an examination of this picture will reveal that I'm fascinated by e-learning and digital media in all forms and I'm also interested in social interaction and various dimensions of human culture. The Skin of Culture by De Kerckhove is over 15 years old, but is a seminal text that argues technology is how humankind defines itself. Smart Mobs by Howard Rheingold, is another seminal text, focusing on how groups of people connect and collaborate through the use of mobile technology. More recent books focus on social media and collaboration, including Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, Seth Godin's Tribes and The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. Each in their own way are defining volumes of the social media age. Tapscott and Williams' Wikinomics, first published in 2007, shows how mass collaboration through Web 2.0 has changed forever the way we create knowledge and do business. Other books, such as David Crystal's Txting and Mediated by Thomas De Zengotita, provide incredibly useful contexts about how mobile devices and media shape the world around us and create the digital terrain within which we work and learn.

I could go on, but in each case, I highly recommend each and every one of the books you see on my bookshelf. They make up an important part of my PLE and have given me inspiration and provided clarity to my thinking.

NB: Yep, I know a couple of my own books have crept in there too, but what self-respecting academics do not have their own books on their shelves? Besides, Connected Minds is a compendium of great essays from other people in my PLN - I was merely the editor, so it doesn't really count. Now it's your turn....What text books do you keep on your shelf?

Personal learning resources by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.