Another look at PLEs – G. Atwell

February 2, 2009 at 12:25 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , ,

Graham Atwell suggests that PLEs might be the future of education in his presentation:

At a glance the main functions Graham outlines for a PLE are as follows:

  • Search
  • Aggregate and scaffold
  • Manipulate – test, try, experiment – “mixing deck for ideas”
  • Analyse – make sense of the information aggregated
  • Storing – increasingly important – store or backup the information stored on various services on the web “myself”
  • Presenting – presenting all these ideas/knowledge
  • Representing – presentation in context
  • Sharing – of the representations

To sum up Graham asks: What a PLE is and what can we do with a PLE?

Good questions, I feel everytime I have a bit of an idea about either things get muddled up again. Even more so, when we get to looking at any sort of implementation, even of just some aspects, we get caught up with these same questions. Even more frustrating is the round-about nature of some of these features and functions which get a bit generic – which is fine – but when we look to some sort of implementation specifics become necessary.

Other issues still unresolved are the institutional control problems – if it’s not hosted by the institution issues of compliance and control seem to arise. How much all this even matters is pondered on elearnspace and to some extent I see this issue as being one where we can’t prescribe an environment or require its use LMS style, but where we’re aiming to assist and show people how they might better enable their own approach to their (institutionally homed) learning. Hopefully the long term effect is that they can then apply their comfort with perhaps a few tools to their ongoing work and learning outside and after university.

Anyway, a few ways forward appear to becoming clearer:

  1. work with a couple of groups of academics to get some of these things in front of a group of users – having a clear idea of what works, is wanted, is useful to compare against what we/others think is required will go a long way to moving us forwards
  2. wait and see what 1. shows us 🙂

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