Everyone has one

Everyone has one - a personal learning environment, that is. Just look around when you are next sat on a bus or train, and you will see people sat listening with earbuds or using their mobile phones. Some will be reading books, or Kindles. Others will be discussing current affairs with their friends, or reading newspapers. It's quite simple. We all learn. We all use tools to help us learn. Personal learning environments or PLEs, are the collection of tools (not just online) that enable us to connect, create and share content with our own communities of interest and practice. Mine will be different to yours, because my choices and preferences about what and how I learn are different to yours. And what you choose to use personalises your learning, making it uniquely yours.


Today at the Personal Learning Environment conference in Southampton, delegates debated whether students actually have the competency to build their own PLEs. A Twitter discussion ensued, but ultimately, I think the wrong question was asked. Why should we question whether students have the competency to build their own PLEs, when in fact most learners already have their own PLE structure of tools sorted out when they arrive at university. As they gain more knowledge of their subject, broaden their personal learning networks and gain access to more content, so they modify their PLE to accommodate all the necessary storage, tagging and co-creation of content that ensues. Graham Attwell, in a recent keynote at the EDEN Dublin conference, made the profound statement that 'competency' is a socially and culturally constructed concept that has many interpretations. So the question is problematic on at least two levels. It depends on what you mean by competency.

The question that should have been asked was: Do students have the necessary skills to apply their informal PLEs in formal learning contexts? In other words, do they have the ability to use the loose aggregation of Web 2.0 tools (iGoogle, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube etc) to help them to engage more deeply with their learning? Do they have the prerequisite skills to apply these tools in a manner that gives them an advantage in their course of study? When I was an undergraduate, I used all kinds of tricks to short cut my study and buy me time. These included getting my hands on next year's course materials from previous students, and finding out what the assessment questions were likely to be when I finally sat them. It worked, and I emerged with a first class honours degree. Doesn't work for everyone, and that's why university staff should not attempt to impose tools onto students. Each student certainly has the competency to build their own PLEs and to decide what their tools and preferences for learning are. They are experts in them, after all.

“Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.” - Dr Suess.

Image source by Denise Parker


Everyone has one by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.