The personal web

With the Southampton PLE Conference #PLE_SOU at full throttle, I thought it would be a good time to reiterate my views on the personal web. Personal Web Tools (PWTs) are thought by some to be synonymous with PLEs (Personal Learning Environments) but the two should not be confused. The authors of the Horizon Report (I cannot recommend the Horizon Report series highly enough) succinctly define the personal web as"a term coined to represent a collection of technologies that confer the ability to reorganize, configure and manage online content rather than just viewing it". The report goes on to define personal webs as self created, and consisting of online tools that suit each individual's unique preferences, styles and needs. Sound like a PLE? Almost, but not quite.

My view is that PWTs sit inside a PLE but they are not the whole story. I believe the PLE extends beyond personal web tools to encompass other tools and resources, such as paper based resources and broadcast media such as television and radio, as well as conversations with other people, realia experiences and so on. Having said that, each and every one of the above could be mediated through web tools, but they are not exclusively so. I attempted to map these components out in a post entitled Anatomy of a PLE.

At its core, the personal web is also very proactive: The Horizon Report gave an excellent, if somewhat idealised conceptualisation of the personal web: "Using a growing set of free and simple tools and applications, it is easy to create customized, personal web-based environments — a personal web — that explicitly supports one’s social, professional, learning and other activities via highly personalized windows to the networked world. Online material can be saved, tagged, categorized, and repurposed without difficulty..."

I recognise that there is a problem here, and this has been pointed out by some of those who have responded to my Two fingered salute post and was also touched on during yesterday's session at the PLE conference in Southampton. It is this: Not everyone has the skills to use, or is willing to use personal web tools. For those who don't, the institutional VLE (or sadly, no web based use at all) is an alternative.

This may sound like a climb down from my position on the death of the VLE, but It is not. I have always believed in a hybrid solution and indeed use one in my own professional practice, but for the sake of the polemic momentum, I'm advocating that institutions seriously reappraise their use of the VLE (read 'managed learning environment'). Much of it is dross, creative thinking is stifled, true collaboration is constrained, many students hate it, and many of the staff are not all that keen either (because it creates a lot of hard work with very little pay-off). Where do you go it you want to learn something new? Certainly not the VLE. The institutional VLE cannot by any stretch of the imagination, be perceived as a personal web - it is often too sterile and homogenised - but I concede that it can be a useful, safe and content rich starting point for those who are embarking on learning through the web.

Image source by Freefoto.com


The personal web by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.