Limitless learning

The personal learning environment (PLE) is still a bone of contention. Over at the Open University of Catalonia, in Barcelona, Ismael Peña-López has been doing some stirling work on theories surrounding Vygotsky's learning model and PLEs. His article can be accessed here in its entirety. Ismael starts by simplifying Vygotskian theory. He reasons that for Vygotsky, learning features three distinct layers: 1) What learners can achieve independently, 2) what they can do with the help of someone else (he calls this a more knowledgeable other or MKO and 3) that which is beyond the learner's reach, even with the help of an MKO.

Layer two can be defined as the Zone of Proximal Development or ZPD. What is interesting about Ismael's model is the way he incorporates the ZPD into a general model of the PLE, and argues that in fact, both MKOs and ZPD can constitute a PLE. This is all premised on whether we conceive of a PLE as a learning philosophy rather than simply a set of tools as most people see it. I'm in agreement with Ismael on this - I see the Personal Learning Environment as more than just a set of tools, or experiences, or environments. For me, the PLE is also more than a counterpoint to the centralisation/standardisation philosophy that spawned the institutional content management systems and services we see commonly today in schools, colleges and universities.

For me, the PLE is peculiar to the individual who makes it. It reflects his personality, learning characteristics and preferences. PLEs are constructed by the individuals who use them. This requires individuals to manage the connections between the tools, experiences, spaces and people, and this is often achieved within a digital framework. It is at the point that we accept that PLE is a learning philosophy, says Ishmael, that the entire vista of possibilities begins to open up to us. Ismael then makes the bold claim: "A PLE can be conformed by virtually everything that exists out in the cyberspace. If virtually everything is at reach, virtually everything can be understood as the more knowledgeable other. With a full, total, comprehensive access to the more knowledgeable other there virtually is no upper limit of the Zone of Proximal Development, there virtually is no level of problem solving that is unreachable for the student." The diagram above illustrates this vast potential very clearly. This is a bold and interesting theoretical punt which should serve to reinvigorate the debate about the purpose and scope of Personal Learning Environments. It means that potentially, if we have the appropriate tools and are connected to the right people, learning will be limitless.

Image by Ismael Peña-López


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

Reciprocity learning

I watched this morning's PLE conference (#pleconf) unkeynote by Grainne Conole and Ricardo Torres Kompen, which was streamed live from Aveiro, in Portugal. In it, they represented a number of perspectives on personal learning environments, including a discussion on the differential between institutionally managed Virtual Learning Environments (or VLEs) and the free tools that learners are now using on the web. Particularly emphasised was the power and capability of the personal learning network (or PLN) which can not only save you time when you are looking for the answer, but can also lock you into a huge network of like-minded individuals, from where you can 'distribute your knowledge'. We are indeed 'distributed beings', said Grainne, perhaps invoking the work of Mark Curtis.

There was much food for thought, but the conversation that struck me the most, was between them and one of the delegates in the hall, Ilona Buchem (aka @mediendidaktik). Grainne and Ricardo had crowdsourced much of their presentation, through a series of video clips, blogs and tweets. Reflecting this willingness to participate, Ilona suggested that much of the power of the PLN is owed to the willingness of participants to share their knowledge with each other freely. The old adage 'you scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours' has never been so well applied as it is to does to the PLN. This kind of reciprocity occurs because people are willing to share, and in so doing, are free to then gain access to the sharing of the other members of their community. It's a kind of membership fee of the largest community on the planet - the network of networks that many millions of people are making use of to connect to each other, to ideas, knowledge and experiences beyond their own immediate physical sphere.

The psychologist Leon Festinger developed social comparison theory - a theory that attempted to explain how people relate to each other psychologically. He suggested that we compare ourselves to others often subconsciously, and then attempt to improve our own positions and gain more accurate self evaluation. It is very much rooted in the traditions of symbolic interactionism (see for example the work of Charles Cooley or George Herbert Mead). Social comparison, in Festinger's terms, is not considered to be a form of competition, but more likely will be to elicit a feeling of belonging within our chosen community. It goes farther. Most would agree that the act of self-disclosure at the start of a relationship can garner a similar response from others. Self disclosure reveals something personal or subjective about yourself. If I remark that I come from Plymouth in South West of England (personal information), the person I am conversing with is more likely to reciprocate by telling me where they are from, or may even remark on their interest in England, or Plymouth, some allied topic such as Sir Francis Drake or the Mayflower. It breaks the ice to self disclose.

In the same way, reciprocity learning relies on the willingness of both parties to give freely. I have written before about the merits of giving your stuff away for free. You never fail to be rewarded. We are, in Mark Zuckerberg's terms, living within a gift ecology - where without freely offered knowledge, and a little give and take, we would all be much poorer.

Image by Chris Ishikawa (NB: Chris made his cute animal image free for use under a CC licence, so his photo gains a wider audience on this blog. Other photographers chose not to offer their cute animal photos in the same way, so they miss out on you appreciating their artistry. Just saying....)


Reciprocity learning by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

My Personal Learning Network

I was asked by Grainne Conole to record a short video on my views about Personal Learning Networks, VLEs vs PLEs and other related topics, as a contribution toward her unkeynote with Ricardo Torres Kompen for the PLE conference in Aviero, Portugal this week. Well, here it is, as a short 3 minute video on YouTube:




My Personal Learning Network by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Learning in a Digital Age: The myth and the reality

I recently gave a keynote at the eLearning 2.0 conference held at Brunel University, in West London. The presentation was a reworked version of one I gave earlier in the year in Tallinn, Estonia. In Learning in a Digital Age: The Myth and the Reality, I present a number of widespread beliefs about elearning, and challenge the provenance, reasoning and application of these theories. Learning styles, digital natives and immigrants theory, and the arguments that you cannot personalise learning in large organisations; or that SMS txting is dumbing down language; are all scrutinised and challenged. Brunel University did an excellent job of recording my voice and the slides, and synchonising them, probably using Camtasia or a similar tool. Here it is in full, for those who want to follow the arguments and discussion that ensued.



Learning in a Digital Age: The myth and the reality by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

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.

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.

Digital literacy 6: Content creation

One of the most important digital literacies students require today is the ability to create appropriate, subject specific content. Content creation is an important feature in many personal learning environment (PLE) models, and together with organising and sharing, makes up the cardinal triumvirate of skills that provides learners with a clear advantage. If you subscribe to constructivist theories of learning, you will understand why the creation of content is important in any context. We learn by doing, and we more actively engage with learning when we create artefacts that can be shared within social contexts such as communities of practice. Artefacts are a material outworking of knowledge creation, and according to Vygotsky, they can be aids to solving problems that could not be solved as effectively in their absence. In turn, such artefacts can also influence the individuals who use them to draw attention to previously unknown activities and ways of conceptualising the world around us. When I write a blog post for example, I am creating new content as I write, and then in turn, that content may reveal to me something I may have missed if I had not written the post. The blog content allows me perhaps to view a problem from a different perspective. In essence, writing a blog enables me to know what I am thinking, in a concrete, persistent and searchable form.

There are many other ways to create content besides the blog of course. The use of wikis in group learning to promote collaboration and make a record of what has been learnt is becoming more popular in all sectors of education. Podcasts, normally in the form of the audio recording of an event, are also a means of projecting and sharing content to others so that they can listen at a time and in a place (usually on the move) of their choosing. Sharing of other forms of content such as images and videos can be easily achieved with the use of photo and video sharing services such as Flickr and Youtube. I often share my slideshows through this channel, and receive feedback and other data on their subsequent uses. However, for any of the above formats of user generated content to be fully usable, it first needs to be located. Without organisation and tagging (the use of key descriptive words) such content is not searchable. In my next blog post in this series on digital literacies, I will explore this facet of the social web in more detail. Tomorrow: Organising and sharing content.

Image source


Content creation by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Deeply personal

When you're on holiday, I guess you must have come across people selling 'personalised' souvenirs. Name plates for doors, T-shirts, mugs, keyrings, even baseball caps - with every name under the sun on them (well almost - the only names I haven't seen on any personalised merchandising are 'Adolf' and 'Jezebel'. I'm not sure why...) Such merchandising is 'personalised' because one of those mugs - the one the shopkeeper hopes you're going to buy - has your name on it. But wait. It's not really personalised is it? You didn't make the mug. Someone made it for you - and then put your name on it. And then you buy it and use it. It becomes yours. But is it really that deeply personal?

I was reading Jim Campbell's article on personalisation of learning again today. I referred to it in my last post and promised I would revisit it. He explores Leadbeater's taxonomy of personalisation as it relates to public health care. Leadbeater's 5 levels of personalisation were: 1) providing more customer friendly services 2) giving people more say in how they use the services 3) giving users more say in how money is spent on the services 4) users become co-designers and co-producers of the services, and 5) self organisation of services by individuals, with support provided by professionals.

Ring any bells yet? For me this resonates clearly with the tension between the provision of Content Management Systems (what we commonly call institutional VLEs) and personal learning environments (PLEs). Campbell argues that the first 3 of Leadbeater's levels are shallow forms of personalisation, while the last two are deeper forms of personalisation. So let's apply this to personal learning environments by translating the 5 levels into an education context.

1) Providing learners with more student centred opportunities 2) giving learners more choice in what they learn, how and when and where they learn it 3) giving learners more say on how resources are used 4) learners design and produce their own content 5) learners self organise their own learning with the support of professionals.

It is clear to see that in an educational context, the same kind of personalisation of services could be applied as in public health care. Can we shift from the edubusiness making a product for the institution, and then branding it on their behalf, to the point where the learner can choose and construct the learning environment they want to use, and the personalise it for themselves? The problem is, learners are a little like patients in many ways - they are the consumers of the product, and transforming them into the co-producers of the service they will also consume requires that a) they view themselves as being capable of doing so b) the professionals who have so far provided the service actually trust them and c) there is an infrastructure in place to support the process. The third component is already in place - Web 2.0 tools are available for all learners to choose and use to support their own self organised learning. It's the first two that are the problem if we are ever to get to the point where learning becomes deeply personal for all.

Image source


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

Personalised learning

I have been thinking a lot about personalised learning lately. Last night, during a panel discussion for the Plymouth Education Society, I made a statement that the current UK National Curriculum doesn't make a lot of room for personalised learning. I quoted Ken Robinson who has claimed that the current model of school is based on an industrialised or 'factory' model, where children are 'processed in batches' according to their year groups. This model patently doesn't work, because it fails to take into account the variations in performance and ability within year groups. What happens next is that schools try to redress this imbalance by streaming kids - placing them into sets so that the 'brighter ones' get the chance to shine, while the 'less bright ones' are not left behind. That's all very well for the school management, but it can also be very devisive, and stigmatises some children. It may also be premised on faulty assessment methods.

Standardised assessment militates against personalised learning too. Many schools practice assessment of learning using a criterion referenced assessment. While this is an improvement over norm referenced assessment, it still fails students. What schools should be doing is assessing for learning - providing students with personalised feedback on their performance referenced against their own previous personal attainment - what we refer to as ipsative assessment. Thankfully some schools are now adopting this approach through for example, APP - Assessing Pupil Progress, or PLP - Personal Learning Plans. But it's not happening quickly or widely enough.

Today I sat in a seminar led by Professor Jim Campbell, of the University of Warwick. Jim had given us a paper he had published in 2007 to read and critique. It was entitled: Personalised Learning: Ambiguities in Theory and Practice. Reading the paper made me think hard about what we actually mean by personalised learning. In the paper Campbell et al draw upon Leadbeater's model of surface and deep personalisation, where the student steadily progresses from consumer to producer behaviour. There is a great deal of cross over here with personal learning environments (PLEs) of course, particularly in relation to user generated content and sharing within a community of practice. This is an area I intend to explore in more detail in future blog posts.

Reference

Campbell, R. J. et al (2007) Personalised Learning: Ambiguities in Theory and Practice. British Journal of Educational Studies, 55 (2), 135-154.

Image source

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

When worlds collide

In yesterday's post I gave the first part of a review of the latest issue of the journal Interactive Learning Environments, which is a special issue entitled: 'Towards eLearning 2.0 University'. There are 7 papers in the issue, each of which focus on social media that are being used to support and enhance learning in higher education. I promised I would continue the review today, right here on this blog, so here goes...

The research by Wopereis et al, with the title 'Weblogs as instruments for reflection on action in teacher education' set out to analyse how student teachers used them during their training. The paper concludes that although some reflective content was created by students, blogs do not naturally promote deeper forms of reflection without some scaffolding through tutor intervention. Interestingly, the students reported that they found the blogs useful for reflecting on action, and the authors postulate that with tutor support over a greater period of study time, meta-reflection might emerge as a result of prolonged blog writing, and revisiting of content.

Two papers reporting on research into the implementation of personal learning environments using social media provide a little controversy for the special issue. The first, by Valjataga and Laanpere, focuses on learner control of the environment, and how it poses a challenge for instructional design. This is reminiscent of the discussions held at the recent PLE conference in Barcelona, where some theorists attempted to defuse the tensions between didactic institutional provision and individualised PLEs by proposing a compromise. To reconcile the two seemingly polemic positions of learner control vs institutional provision, the authors of this paper propose that the PLE requires an elaboration, which 'integrates important instructional functions for learner control'. They argue that learners are in varying stages of readiness to create and adopt their own personal learning environments and that a deeper understanding of this is required to ensure future success.

The second PLE paper by Cascero et al, proposes an even deeper form of compromise, suggesting a middle ground between institutional provision and personalised tools and spaces. The iPLE (institutional PLE) sounds like a contradiction in terms but the authors are actually proposing 'a shift from the monolithic model of traditonal virtual learning environments to a more heterogenous and open model'. The authors propose a conceptual architecture of the iPLE and show how they propose it could merge the best functions and features of both worlds. Cascero et al justify the iPLE by arguing that 'iPLE is an attempt to build a PLE from the point of view of the university, so that every institutional service can be integrated, but flexible enough to interact with the wide range of services learners could consider important during their lifelong learning'. Sounds like two worlds are about to collide....

An institutional PLE? Impossible or feasible? This last article certainly offers a controversial and fascinating read, and will doubtless provoke some fierce debate.

Image source

When worlds collide by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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.

Physiology of a PLE

Yesterday I posted my views on what I think are the essential components of a Personal Learning Environment - the Anatomy of the PLE. Today, I want to examine some of the functionality of PLEs - the physiology if you will - what is it that learners need from their PLEs? The slide to the left represents the three main functionalities I believe are the most important functions learners need for lifelong learning in a digital age. You will note that the functionality is exclusive to the personal web tools (PWTs) I outlined in yesterday's post. However, given that the context of the PLE is much wider than the web tools a student uses, it is possible to apply creation, organisation and sharing of content to a wider range of practices including analogue content, such as newspapers and magazines, realia (visits, real experiences, encounters, conversations) and other non-digital materials. Whether these remain analogue, or are in someway captured in digital format remains the choice of each indivdual lifelong learner.

There are other functionalities of course, but I believe that the essence of the physiology of most PLEs is represented in the diagram presented here. A fourth component, communication - which includes sharing, discussion and dialogue in both synchronous and asynchronous modes, can be represented as an overarching circle within the Venn diagram.

Such key functions of the PLE (Personal Web Tools component) can be managed through a number of tools, and learners each have their individual preferences, all of which ensures that each PLE will be unique to that individual learner. Some of these tools are represented here in the second figure, but these are by no means exhaustive, and of course, many are interchangable for different tasks and purposes. Note that the e-portfolio sits across all functionalities, and is the most likely tool to be provided by the institution. There is plenty more I could say but I will leave that for another blog post. I hope that these concept maps provide a more detailed set of ideas which provide a clearer view of how and why PLEs can be created, developed, managed and used by learners.

Physiology of a PLE by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Anatomy of a PLE

Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) do exactly what they say on the can - they are personal to each individual, created by them, owned by them, used by them within their lifelong learning. Originally a counterpoint to the institutional Managed Learning Environment (iMLE or 'VLE'), PLEs are becoming a much talked about concept, and were the prime focus of the recently held PLE Conference in Cornella, Barcelona. Delegates at the conference could not agree whether PLEs should remain the sole domain of the learner, or whether in some way they could be incorporated into institutional infrastructures. Some argued strongly for sole student ownership, vehemently opposed to any institutional meddling in a personal learning environment. Others held the position that PLEs should have some insitutional provision incorporated within them. Still others thought that PLEs should be part of the institutional infrastructure, brought within the protective envelope of the university fire wall. Many located themselves in middle ground positions. My personal view is that students own and create their PLE but that the iMLE also has something to offer them, even though it is highly problematic in its current form. I am arguing that many students tend to avoid using the iMLE because they either find it difficult to use, or irrelevant to their daily learning needs. It is a clash of concepts, no bridge seems possible, and the problem appears to be intractable.

I have been working with Manish Malik (University of Portsmouth) for some time now to try to reconceptualise PLEs, so that they are locatable within both informal and formal learning contexts. At the Barcelona PLE Conference we unveiled our ideas in a position paper, which we also share here on this blog. In previous posts I have argued provocatively that institutional VLEs present a number of problems for individual learners, not least the walled garden effect, which presents a great barrier to student freedom and creativity. I have played devil's advocate, role playing at high profile events to promote debate, engaging fruitfully with many knowledgeable peers, and in the process I have had some great fun. Now it's time to change direction a little and challenge the unhelpful binary of PLE versus VLE.

Firstly, we need to understand the true nature of the PLE - its anatomy. What does a PLE look like? What are its essential components? How does it differ from institutionally provided systems? Is there any common ground, and if so, how can this be harnessed? All these questions and more are yet to be answered, but in our view, the PLE is wider than the Web tools students use to create, find, organise and share content. It is also wider than the Personal Learning Network (PLN) of people and content that each of us generates when we learn informally or in formal contexts. This is represented in the first slide above.

In this representation of the PLE, we try take a more consiliatory perspective beyond the unhelpful binary discourse of 'PLE vs VLE'. We propose a hybrid approach. Essentially, we argue that students require structure and scaffolding when they first venture into digital learning environments. No-one is a digital native, no matter how much the Prensky theory is talked up. Yet the average institutional Managed Learning Environment is by nature dull, uninspiring and difficult to navigate. Web 2.0 tools (Cloud Learning Environment) are more attractive, easier to use and free, but are unprotected and vulnerable. Further, the content sent to the application ends up becoming the 'property' of the Internet company and is difficult to delete, a target for data mining. Whilst CLEs will not fully address all of the tensions between iMLEs and PLEs, we argue that they provide a tentative bridge to provide the best of both worlds in terms of affordances and interoperability. We would be very interested to hear your views on this proposal. Tomorrow: Physiology of a PLE

Related posts

Response to Anatomy of a PLE: Mark Smithers

The Dichotomies in Personal Learning Environments: Ismael Pena-Lopez

Mapping the PLE Sphere: Ismael Pena-Lopez

The ILE and FLE in Harmony: Ryan Tracey

Anatomy of a PLE by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

PLE bargaining

The first conference on PLEs took place in the humid but tranquil Cornella area of Barcelona this week. For two days, the 'unconference' event hosted delegates from all over the world at the silubrious and very impressive Citilab Cornella. Those attending the PLE Conference found themselves quickly immersed in discussion, dialogue and debate over the nature and ethos of the personal learning environment. For me and many others who attended (both physically and virtually) it was probably the most connected event we have experienced. The Twitter stream alone went wild, and by midday on the second day there had been over 5000 messages inserted into the #PLE-BCN hashtag stream. Every session, including the breakout sessions, was streamed live over the web, and many people participated from outside the event. Many of the photos of the event are already up on Flickr at this site. A great set of photos by David Alvarez is also available here.

The unKeynote was quite a feature of this event. Day one kicked off with Alec Couros and Graham Attwell performing a double act in which they managed to engage just about every member of the audience in some way. We discussed issues such as the definition of a PLE, the tensions existing where binary representations of institutions vs individual provision of web tools is used, and the future of learning in the context of personalised pedagogies. Assessment and accreditation of learning were discussed, as was the curriculum. Ilona Buchem (on Twitter @mediendidaktik) has written a useful summary of Day 1 and Lisa Harris offers her personal reflection of the event. In the unKeynote speech by Jordi Angel and Ismael de Pena (all in Spanish with live mobile translation) on Day 2, the speakers promised chaos. What they got was chaos and also a tinge of anarchy, as the entire audience ran around and voted with their feet in a quadrant of options a the back of the room. The conclusion of this exercise? We couldn't agree. What we did agree on though, was that the PLE is 'all about me' - it's what each of us personally creates around us as a means to support our lifelong learning. A number of questions were posed such as: should the PLE remain outside the institution. The super edupunks were at loggerheads with the conservatives, and there were many, many shades in between. Some preferred to remain in the centre of the quadrant to be counted in all four camps. It was fun, dynamic, and thought provoking all at once. I think the picture above by the wonderfully effervescent Joyce Seitzinger (follow her on Twitter as @catspyjamasnz) epitomises the experience.

When I have more time I will try to capture some of the true essence of this astounding event. But right now I have to pack for a flight back to the UK, so I will blog later. Hasta la vista!

Image source

PLE bargaining by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Grand tour

I'm off on my travels again later today, this time on a grand tour taking in the length of Europe. After a brief visit into the University of Plymouth, to shake hands with my Vice Chancellor and collect my Teaching Fellowship award, it's a quick dash off to Bristol Airport to catch my afternoon flight to the land of the midnight sun. Yes, Helsinki (via Brussels) is my next port of call where I will be working for a few days at the invitation of the Finnish Research Academy. I will be working in a team of Education experts from Sweden, Denmark, the UK and Greece, to evaluate a number of recent large scale research proposals. I hope I can get some sleep during Finland's white nights.

On Sunday it's down to Frankfurt and a meeting with my old friend Sigi Jakob-Kuhn (follow her as @Networking_Lady on Twitter) in Wienheim, before moving onwards the next day to Heidelberg to attend the International Networking Conference and chair some of their sessions on e-learning. I will meet up with several old friends there too, including my colleagues from the Atlantis Project, Udo Bleimann, Tillmann Swinke, Ingo Stengel, and of course the University of Plymouth's very own Steven Furnell.

It's all change again on Wednesday 7th July when I fly from Frankfurt down to Barcelona to participate in another exciting event - the Personal Learning Environment Conference. A whole host of well known activists, (reading like a Who's Who PLE researcher list) will be speaking at this event including Graham Attwell, Alec Couros, Ismael Pena-Lopez, Dirk Stieglitz, Paulo Simoes, Ricardo Torres Kompen, Palitha Edirisingha, Cristina Costa, Wolfgang Rheinhart, Carmen Holotescu, Gabriela Grosseck, Sebastian Fiedler, Dave White, Jose Mota, Chahira Nouira, Su White, Manish Malik.... I could go on, but you can read the impressive list of speakers for yourself at the link below. There will be some alternative sessions including a speed-cafe style presentation set. We have been told we need to make our own personalised badges too, in keeping with the PLE flavour of the event. You should see my full colour @timbuckteeth badge - it's a corker!

The full programme for the @PLE_BCN event is here at this link. It's going to be a very busy, tiring but enjoyable 10 days for me on my grand tour.

Image source

Grand tour by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

PLE vs VLE

Three of my third year B.Ed Primary education students, Adam Skill, Danny Houton and James Carhart, have created a most excellent video to accompany their paper for the Plymouth e-Learning Conference next month. It gives more than a nod in the direction of the Lee LeFever Plain English videos, but it's still quite original in its own way as you will see....



The paper is titled: Integrating Personal Learning Environments into the Primary Classroom and goes beyond web tools, and even personal learning networks. It examines what happens when children are allowed to choose the ways they wish to learn and what tools they want to help support their learning. It was a bold project, and there are some interesting conclusions to be made. Here's the abstract:

The Personal Learning Environment (PLE) is a concept that describes how learners create and sustain their study through individualised tools and resources. Each PLE by its nature is unique, with each individual choosing their own preferred approaches. Moreover, there is disagreement about the concept of PLEs and controversy over the term ‘personalised’ (Johnson & Liber, 2008). Here we will argue that PLEs are not restricted to web based tools, but can include personal experiences, conversations and other resources such as newspapers, television and radio. Many traditional school environments are based on trial and error, experimentation and discussion?" all of which can be encompassed within a PLE, with computers used as a medium to connect ideas and produce quality presentations for assessment. Collaboration with other learners is also made easier through the use of personal web tools within the learners’ PLE.

In this presentation we aim to explore these ideas and enable teachers to begin thinking about how they can tap into a range of approaches to implementing PLEs in their classrooms. We will also discuss how children can be empowered to manage their own learning goals through the use of PLEs.

To explore the notion of personalisation, we went into three primary schools, where we used two contrasting teaching modes with each class. The first mode was didactic and teacher-led and the second mode was learner-centred, offering the learners their own choices of activities and resources.

From the data gathered we show how children responded to each mode of teaching and their opinions and preferences for each approach. We pay specific attention to the ability groups within each class, and discuss how preferences contrasted within each group. We discuss how individual learner preferences and personal agency can impact upon the ability of children to become more proactive in their learning. We conclude by arguing that the use of PLE approaches can support individual learners to achieve their full potential.

Reference
Johnson, M. and Liber, O. (2008) The Personal Learning Environment and the human condition: from theory to teaching practice. Interactive Learning Environments, 16 (1), 3-15.

Inspired learning

Anyone who has been involved in academic life for a while will tell you that research interests change over time. Mine certainly have. When I first became involved in learning technology research in the early 1980s (it was called 'educational technology' in those days) personal computers were in their infancy, and multi-media was breaking as the next 'big thing' in education. I spent my time developing software packages for 'computer assisted learning' which were text heavy but interactive, and then assessing how effective they were as tools to engage learners. I wanted to know why students were interested, excited, inspired, and why they got bored or demotivated.

Moving on into the 1990s, I began to get interested in distance education and open learning. I changed jobs and became less technically oriented, more learning focused. Over this time, I met several leading lights in the field and through a number of conversations and extensive reading, I began to develop an interest in human behaviour, cognitive processes and then human perception in learning environments. My subsequent degree in psychology then led me on into doing a research degree specifically studying these effects in distance education.

With the advent of the Internet, I began to develop an interest in how people learn in environments where they draw on a number of different sources, such as the Web, television, video, and audio. I could see early on that everything was pointing to convergence. My time spent between 1996-1998 on the RATIO project firmed up my ideas on distance learning, and how students could be engaged remotely using a choice of tools.

Press the fast forward button to the early days of Web 2.0, at the turn of this century, and my thoughts turned to how learners could be engaged in social and collaborative environments, where the rules of ownership were being fractured and where notions of authority and knowledge expertise were being challenged. The emergence of concepts such as personal learning environments, many-to-many broadcasting and user generated content all piqued my interest, and that is the point I have now reached. Most of my current talks and presentations centre on the new technologies and how they engage learners. And that to me, seems to be the theme that has threaded its way through my entire research career - engaging learners. Whatever the technology, whichever the environment, if learners are engaged (motivated, captivated, excited and inspired) I want to know how and why. That's why I'm a researcher in learning technology.

Image source

Wisdom of clouds

This is the first time I've done this, but it's a new year and a new broom. Here is the first Learning with 'E's guest blog post - it's by Manish Malik, who is based at the University of Portsmouth. He has some interesting ideas, and I am happy to host these on my own blog. You can find Manish's poll on his Edublend blog. I think it's an important discussion - so please read his post and then make your vote!

I have been meaning to write this for quite some time now. To be honest, at some point in the run up to the ALT-C 2009 conference, I got this idea. There is a shorter version of this post too. There were many people at a session titled "the VLE is Dead" hosted by James Clay, Josie Fraser, Graham Attwell, Nick Sharratt and Steve Wheeler aka Timbuckteeth :). Martin Weller blogged about the death of VLE/LMS too in Nov 2007.

Scott Leislie coined a term Loosely coupled teaching a month before that. Martin's prediction about a move towards loosely coupled teaching tools has examples in practice today. However, there is more to it. Let me explain:

PLE...a set of tools that the learners enjoy full control on and choice of. The tools within a PLE are most likely not used for the purpose of formal education of all learners within an educational institution. Each learner may use a different set of tools to support/enhance their informal learning.

VLE...a set of tools that the learners enjoy very little control over, if any, or choice of and is an institutional system that is mostly likely for formal education. Academics and the institutions have the most control on this learning environment. Learners may have a say in it to some extent.

Loosely coupled.....to quote Scott, "courses taught using contemporary social software/web 2.0 tools outside a course management system." - again the learner may have little control over these tools but the academic is the owner and has most control/choice. As it's a non institutional learning environment, it is most likely to support informal teaching and learning but may be used for formal teaching and learning too. I have blogged on this type of tools as my own personal teaching environment.

CLE or Cloud Learning Environment....The cloud can be seen as one big autonomous system not owned by any educational institution. Let the Academics or Learners be the users of some cloud based services, where all equally share the privileges like control, choice, sharing of content etc on these services. This is different from a PLE, a VLE and a PTE. For example Google Apps for universities is hosted on the cloud, not fully controlled by any educational institution and certainly not owned by one. The tools on it are to a great extent academic or learner controlled. Each "Google Site", for example, can be owned by an academic or a Learner and both users be given the same rights/control by one another (depending on who creates first). Likewise Google Docs can be owned and shared between learners themselves or learners and academics under their own control.

This gives all parties the same rights on same set of tools. This clearly has potential to enable and facilitate both formal and informal learning for the learner. Both the academic and the learner are free to use the tools the way they wanted and share and collaborate with anyone they wanted. This would not have been possible if either the academics or the learners or for that matter the institution designed and developed the set of tools or bought it from any one supplier. Google Apps was not designed just for institutions or for individuals, it was designed for collaboration both within and accross institutions.

CLEs also make it very easy to generate content and share it with the rest of the world in a DERPable (Discoverable, Editable, Repurposable and Portable) manner, in the spirit of the UKOER programme. With a bit of search engine optimisation it could work magic in terms of making the educational material that sits on a CLE visible and usable by the rest of the world.

Lastly, students at my institution love the Google Apps interface, which makes it very easy to get them to engage with their work using online tools. This can be seen from the crazy usage statistics of Google Sites where I now host my Examopedia.

Image source

Noughties ... but nice

The first decade of the 21st Century was highly significant for personal learning. Such a vast array of new personal devices and web applications was introduced that have become so deeply ingrained in our everyday lives, many of us would probably feel at a loss if we were suddenly transported back to 1999. If we time jumped from then to 2009, the way we now communicate, learn, search for information, share content and consume entertainment would be unrecognisable. The concept of personal learning environments was also introduced, as a counterpoint to the notion of the VLE. Here are just a few of the personal technological innovations (good or bad) that emerged in the noughties:

Mobile ringtones: OK.... perhaps we could do without ringtones. Those irritating little tunes you hear on the train, in the supermarket queue and even interrupting performances in the theatre have actually grossed over £112 million in sales in the UK alone, and they ain't finished yet. As the next generation of mobile users comes of age, they too will demand that their favourite tunes be made into ringtones. The music industry must be rubbing its hands with glee.

iPods and Podcasts: The Touch, the Nano, the Shuffle, the Classic, you name it, versions of the iPod popped up and grabbed our attention in the noughties. First appearing in 2001, the iPod series is now the most successful digital audio player in history with over 220 million worldwide sales at the time of writing.

The Nintendo DS (Dual Screen) appeared in 2004 and was one of the first handheld games consoles with a built in microphone and wireless connectivity. The dual screen technology was not as smart as we first thought, but never the less, it's a great little device to amuse yourself with for a few hours whilst waiting for a train, on the bus, or in the dentist's chair (eew).

The iPhone: Apple strikes again. For most people who have them they are the best thing since sliced bread. But there are those who absolutely hate this smart, touch surface mobile phone. Battery life sucks, the camera on the first series was naff and they are expensive when you are locked into an O2 contract. But they have revolutionised mobile phones with their pinch gesturing and responsive multi-touch screens, and with several copycat devices available, there really is no going back now.

Social networking sites: Facebook (2006), Myspace (2003), Bebo (2005), LinkedIn (2003) and other sites together have changed the face of social networking for ever. For good or bad, millions of users worldwide flock every day to their favourite social networking sites for their daily fix of pokes, foodfights, online games status updates and live chat. Friends and friends of friends - the race is on to see who can collect the most links to people they will never ever meet. Seriously, social networking has blurred the boundaries between public and private, business and leisure, even good and bad taste. The way you manage your on-line identity is more important than ever. Nothing it seems, is 'yours' anymore - once you have posted personal information or photos to Facebook, they are no longer simply 'your property'. They are there forever, and burying the past may prove to be a problem for many...

YouTube: Freaking out, spoofing, parodies, pirated music videos and plenty of dross - that's YouTube for you. Before Youtube it was very difficult to upload your video clips to the Internet. Youtube made it easy for millions. If you want to know a fact you Google it, but if you want to see a clip, you YouTube it.

Nintendo Wii: This small object of desire appeared in November 2006. If we were cynical, we could surmise that Nintendo worked out if all their games playing customers continued to sit on their backsides, they would get fat and die of heart attacks. So they invented an active sports style handset to get games players up and moving about, thus keeping them alive longer so they could earn more money and spend it on Nintendo games and Wii technology. Clever.

Wikipedia: Created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001, Wikipedia has grown rapidly to become one of the largest reference web sites, attracting approximately 65 million visitors each month. It's the first stop students make when they need to know something, and also the most vilified reference source for many scholars and academics. Where else would most of us go though, for quick information.

Google apps: Streetview, Scholar, Google Earth, Docs, etc - all of these applications appeared in the last decade, and have revolutionised the way we learn, work together, look up information and generally play out our online lives. Augmented reality was introduced as a result of the combination of a number of smart device apps including mashups, global positioning and touch screen technologies. The coming decade will see smart devices, augmented reality and haptic semantic applications coming of age. We will then see how these can be applied to enhance and extend the personal learning environment.

...and of course.... there was Twitter: Forget all the celebrity rubbish and media hype. Twitter is one of the best stripped down social networking tools available to humankind. Don't be deceived by it's simplistic appearance though. It's a powerful tool with plenty of filtering capability and its amplification and connection potential is yet to be fully tapped. Twitter and its third party bolt-on tools will be one to watch in the next few years.

So what are we to make of this truly technological ten years? We have seen radical shifts in our views of identity, relationships, copyright, communication and learning. These are deep changes that will not be recinded, and as we move into an ever more connected society, the changes will increase in their pace and intensity. Personalised learning has never been so easy to establish, and never more contentious. No-one can quite agree on what a personal learning environment is, but that is predictable, because for each of us, it is something different. And what of the future? We don't know what the next decade will hold, but we do know this - it will be increasingly connected. It will also be different - probably more different than we can begin to imagine.

Image source

You've been framed

Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development theory has long been revered by the education community as a model for describing what happens when we learn in social contexts. Bright young things will know that the ZPD describes the space where, with the help of a knowledgeable other person, they can extend and enhance their learning beyond that which they might achieve on their own. Reading through the recent blog post by Graham Attwell on Vygotsky's theory, I find myself agreeing with a lot of what has been discussed. Graham has a problem with ZPD in that it implies the presence of a teacher or expert. I agree that this is indeed problematic when we view the amount of self-organised learning and user generated content that is proliferating on the Web. It's blatently obvious we don't always need a 'knowledgeable other' to be breathing down our necks as we negotiate meaning and learn for ourselves in informal settings. Lev Vygotsky's ideas were the product of his lifelong immersion in Communist Soviet society, and it's apparent as you read his writings just how influenced he was by the notion of collective action. Perhaps this is one reason why his work was suppressed for so long and only began to emerge as a major theory of learning long after his premature demise.

Enter Jerome S. Bruner, an American academic who repurposed the idea of the ZPD by introducing the concept of scaffolding (often erroneously attributed to Vygotsky). According to Wikipedia, scaffolding is: '...the provision of sufficient support to promote learning when concepts and skills are being first introduced.' It fades away as the learner becomes more autonomous or expert. If we apply Bruner's ideas we illuminate Vygotsky's model in the digital age. Let's think for a minute: on a building site (the analogy used by Bruner) what is scaffolding used for? It's not used to support the building, because that must ultimately stand on its own. No, scaffolding is there to support the building process - and to support the builders themselves.

Let's now consider that the building represents 'knowledge'. We are constructing this knowledge through a process of exploration, modelling, problem solving and reflecting through interaction with artefacts and social processes. Let's assume the builders represent the learner. The learner uses a number of support mechanisms to achieve the construction of their knowledge. Then the scaffolding is brought down as they move on to the next phase of their learning.

The scaffolding removes the problem of needing a 'knowledgeable other'. It also reconciles ZPD theory with Activity Theory, where social processes and influences assume more importance than social presence. Scaffolding can be any tool or service the learner requires at that time and in that context. It can be a mobile phone or a personal computer. It can be a TV programme or a newspaper, a conversation with a friend or even a chance remark that is overheard. Scaffolding frames the learning process, and supports it, and these are the processes that we see with personal learning environments.

Related posts:

Vygotsky, ZPD, Scaffolding, Connectivism and PLEs (Pat Parslow)
Scaffolding and online synchronous communications (Sarah Horrigan)

Image source