7 Things you should know about...

Personal Learning Environments

2009 EDUCAUSE

1. What is it?

•Not a service or application; but an idea of how individuals approach the task of learning.•describes the tools, communities and services that learners use to direct their own learning and pursue educational goals•Learner-centric not course centric

•Not only online resources but all resources.

2. Who is doing it?

Universities: •Bolton, UK•University of Mary Washington, Virginia•Baylor University•Penn State•University of British Columbia

Offer a site where students can house personal reflections and digital content, return to it, share it and repurpose it in other tools – Encourages PLE’s.

3. How Does It Work?

4. Why is it significant?

• PLEs represent a shift away from the model in which students consume information through independent channels , moving instead to a model where students draw connections from a growing matrix of resources that they select and organize.

5.What are the downsides?

• Personal learning environment is an evolving term, one without a single widely accepted definition.

• Students are required to engage in ongoing decision making to maintain, organize, and grow their learning environments.

• The process of self-directed learning requires a degree of self-awareness, and it must be given time to mature.

6.Where is it going?• The PLE is a result of the

evolution of Web 2.0 and its influence on the educational process.

• The concept is likely to become a fixture in educational theory, engendering widespread acknowledgment of its value, both of its framework and of its components.

• Students will find themselves increasingly work collaborative and relying on their network of contacts for information.

• Students will probably more quickly develop the skill to sort the authoritative from the noise.

• A few institutions may continue developing campus-specific solutions for PLEs, such as customizable portals or dashboards that help.

7. What are the implications for learning and teaching?

• The goal for the student shifts from a need to collect information to a need to draw connections from it—to acquire it, and collaborate in its use

• The use of PLEs enable students to actively consider and reflect upon the specific tools and resources that lead to a deeper engagement with content to facilitate their learning.

History and Evolution

• The PLE is a new concept in education. The UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)-sponsored Centre for Educational Technology & Interoperability Standards (CETIS) traces its origin to an unpublished paper by Bill Olivier and Oleg Liber produced in 2001 .

(Severance, C, Hardin, J, and Whyte, A, 2008)

• Another article suggested that (PLEs) originally surfaced in 1998 when Media Lab in Helsinki released the first version of FLE, Future Learning Environment. (Henri, F, & Charlier, B, 2010)

• The first recorded use of the term was at the JISC/CETIS Conference 2004, referring to a set of different applications, services, and learning resources gathered by learners from a variety of contexts.

• The Association of Learning Technology Conference 2006,

“Most people agree that it is not a software application. Instead, it was suggested that it could be envisaged as a new approach to using technologies for learning. Since then, many research projects have emerged with various types of PLE applications”

(Henri, F, & Charlier, B, 2010)