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"A PLE (personal learning environment) is: a system that helps learners take control of and manage their own learning. This includes providing support for learners to set their own learning goals, manage their learning, manage both content and process, and communicate with others in the process of learning. In contrast, a virtual learning environment (VLE) or learning management system (LMS), such as Blackboard or Moodle, is: a software system designed to help teachers by facilitating the management of educational courses for their students, especially by helping teachers and learners with course administration. The system can often track the learners' progress, which can be monitored by both teachers and learners. Notice the difference? A VLE/LMS is all about controlling how you learn. A PLE is about giving you control over how you learn."

"Supporting Learners In a Digital Age (SLIDA) Overview This project is investigating how institutions are creating and enabling opportunities that promote the development of effective learning in a digital age. The main deliverables of the study are 10 institutional case studies and a final report with recommendations for further and higher education on how to develop effective institution-wide strategies and practices which better support effective learners in a digital age. There is an opportunity here to build capacity in researching learners' needs and experiences. The project team are working collaboratively with each institution to assess what evidence they have available and what further evaluations they could conduct."

Most of this material comes from Blumberg, P. (2008) Developing Learner-Centered Teachers: A Practical Guide for Faculty. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Please cite this reference if you use material from this website This site contains links to presentation or workshops I have done at various places over the past few years. These presentations provide more information about learner-centered teaching and offer some insights into how I conducted the workshops. All workshops have an active learning component either through small group discussions or individual reflection questions.

video clips from the JISC funded E4L project investigating the Learners Experience of E-Learning. The case studies represent learners from Adult and Community Learning (ACL), Further (FE) and Higher Education (HE) undertaking a variety of different courses on various subject areas.

"Institutional approaches to curriculum design Curriculum design blog JISC Curriculum Design & Delivery1 * The Future of QA & QE2 Tue, 06 Jul 2010 18:25:50 +0000 Various group discussions and the panel session at the QA & QE in e-Learning conference at the Unive... * QA QE Toolkit3 Tue, 06 Jul 2010 18:03:22 +0000 A toolkit created by the QAQE SIG was the subject of discussion & consultation at the QA & QE in e-L... * Review of QAA Code of Practice4 Tue, 06 Jul 2010 17:41:27 +0000 Brief notes from the QA & QE in e-Learning conference at the University of Hertfordshire on 2nd July... The aim of the JISC e-Learning programme is to enable UK further and higher education to create a better learning environment for all learners, wherever and however they study. Its vision is of a world where learners, teachers, researchers and wider institutional stakeholders use technology to enhance the overall educational experience by improving flexibility and creativity and by encouraging comprehensive and diverse personal, high quality learning, teaching and research."

Many educators in successful schools are involved in their school's professional learning community and perhaps they even collaborate with other schools in the district, city, state, country or beyond, but Innovative Educators also have personal learning networks (PLNs) enabling them to connect with other learners around the globe. If you're new to this world, personal learning networks are created by an individual learner, specific to the learner's needs extending relevant learning connections to like-interested people around the globe. PLNs provide individuals with learning and access to leaders and experts around the world bringing together communities, resources and information impossible to access solely from within school walls.

"Dave's five points about PLEs PLNs for PLENK2010 Here is my adaptation… * Point #1: I use the term personal learning network (PLN) to refer to all of the following: professional learning network, personal learning environment, learning management system, course management system, etc. A node that makes up a PLN can be a person, group, institution, online community, software program, etc. And it's personal if the learner (and not a teacher, trainer, expert, etc.) has control over which nodes to connect with and what type of interaction the learner prefers to have with each node."

Since Illich's 1970 vision of learning webs, society has moved progressively closer to a networked world where content and conversations are continually at our finger tips and instruction and learning are not centered on the educator. The last decade of technological innovation - mobile phones, social media, software agents - has created new opportunities for learners. Learners are capable of forming global learning networks, creating permeable classroom walls. While networks have altered much of society, teaching, and learning, systemic change has been minimal. This presentation will explore how potential systemic responses leverage the transformative potential of connective knowledge and networked learning.

Learning as a Network Posted on May 7th, 2009 by Harold Jarche Mohamed Amine Chatti extends the framework on personal knowledge networks with his post on Learning as a Network (follow link for graphic): The Learning as a Network (LaaN) perspective draws together some of the concepts behind double-loop learning and connectivism. It starts from the learner and views learning as the continuous creation of a personal knowledge network (PKN). For each learner, a PKN is a unique adaptive repertoire of: - One's theories-in-use. This includes norms for individual performance, strategies for achieving values, and assumptions that bind strategies and values together (conceptual/internal level) Tacit and explicit knowledge nodes (i.e. people and information) (external level

"It's not always easy to differentiate between critical pedagogy, active learning, and the learner- or learning-centered approaches. Each is predicated on the notion of student engagement and proposes involvement via such strategies as collaborative and cooperative learning and problem-based learning. All recommend a move away from lecturing. Critical pedagogy is the most extreme of the three and has some unique characteristics. The authors below describe its basic tenets as eradication of the teacher-student contradiction "whereby the teacher teaches and the students are taught; the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing; the teacher talks and the students listen; and the teacher is the subject and the students are mere objects." (p. 26) Critical pedagogy also has a political agenda; it views education as a means to achieve social justice and change."

"The National Research Council of Canada's Institute for Information Technology (Learning and Collaborative Group) has started a research and development project exploring the Personal Learning Environment. The project researches how new technologies can be used in a personalized informal learning environment and focuses on two dimensions. The first dimension is the pedagogical: given the new affordances offered by web technologies, how can access to a wide variety of learning opportunities best be managed in an online environment? The second dimension is technical. Given a set of desired types of connections, what technologies can be assembled to best provide seamless access to a large variety of educational resources and services? Existing learning management technology (such as the Learning Management System) is centered on the institution that owns and operates it as enterprise software. With the increase of lifelong and student-centered learning, individuals are more frequently enrolling in learning opportunities from multiple institutions and have a need to manage their learning through an entire career. Thus there is a need for a type of application that is centered on the learner and would constitute the person's personal learning record, portfolio, business and educational contacts, communications and creativity tools, library and resource subscription management, and related services. Stephen Downes, the project leader:"

"Following on from the publication of the Leitch Review of Skills5 and the publication of the Government's World Class Skills implementation plan6 institutions are no longer expected to simply prepare graduates for a world of work, but to continuously support the learning and professional development of working people. It is therefore important for institutions to develop more flexible and creative models of delivery in order to support the development of autonomous, lifelong learners who are skilled in reflecting on their learning (both formal and informal) and planning for their personal, educational and professional development. This programme aims to stimulate change, working towards this vision. "

"The Personal Learning Environment concept is relatively new and is often used interchangeably with Personal Learning Network. The earliest reference is attributed to George Siemens in his 2004 paper, Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age. Downes and Attwell have also popularised the concept with Downes describing the PLE as "a tool that allows for a learner (or anyone) to engage in a distributed environment consisting of a network of people, services and resources" (2006, p23). Semantically, a personal learning environment and a personal learning network differ, with a network referring to connections and the interaction between them, and an environment referring to a broader definition that includes more passive tools and settings. The network and its broader socially constructed environment are interdependent, constantly shaping each other and unable to be separated."

Eduserv Foundation The Eduserv Foundation contributes to Eduserv's charitable mission, realising the effective use of IT for learners and researchers, by offering research grants, contributing to international interoperability standards-making activities, seed-funding and developing pilot projects and offering advice on good practice. We also sponsor meetings, events and other activities. We focus these activities in the following areas: * resource discovery, metadata and open access, * access and identity management, * service architectures and Web 2.0, * e-portfolios and the use of 3-D virtual worlds such as Second Life in education.

Social Media Classroom Invitation to the Social Media Classroom and Collaboratory Welcome to the Social Media Classroom and Collaboratory. It's all free, as in both "freedom of speech" and "almost totally free beer." We invite you to build on what we've started to create more free value. The Social Media Classroom (we'll call it SMC) includes a free and open-source (Drupal-based) web service that provides teachers and learners with an integrated set of social media that each course can use for its own purposes-integrated forum, blog, comment, wiki, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets , and video commenting are the first set of tools. The Classroom also includes curricular material: syllabi, lesson plans, resource repositories, screencasts and videos. The Collaboratory (or Colab), is what we call just the web service part of it. Educators are encouraged to use the Colab and SMB materials freely, and we host your Colab communities if you don't want to install your own. (See this for an explanation of who "we" are).

Learning space design and development is a hot topic as our colleges and universities not only seek to provide 21st-century learning facilities, but look to optimise space to best effect and respond to learner expectations. Technology has a vital role to play in this.

A Radically Different World If you think our future will require better schools, you're wrong. The future of education calls for entirely new kinds of learning environments. If you think we will need better teachers, you're wrong. Tomorrow's learners will need guides who take on fundamentally different roles. As every dimension of our world evolves so rapidly, the education challenges of tomorrow will require solutions that go far beyond today's answers.

Asynchronous and Synchronous E-Learning Asynchronous and Synchronous E-Learning Author(s):Stefan Hrastinski (Uppsala University) © 2008 Stefan Hrastinski EDUCAUSE Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 4 (October-December 2008) Asynchronous and Synchronous E-Learning A study of asynchronous and synchronous e-learning methods discovered that each supports different purposes By Stefan Hrastinski Today's workforce is expected to be highly educated and to continually improve skills and acquire new ones by engaging in lifelong learning. E-learning, here defined as learning and teaching online through network technologies, is arguably one of the most powerful responses to the growing need for education.1 Some researchers have expressed concern about the learning outcomes for e-learners, but a review of 355 comparative studies reveals no significant difference in learning outcomes, commonly measured as grades or exam results, between traditional and e-learning modes of delivery.2

Social Media Classroom Invitation to the Social Media Classroom and Collaboratory Welcome to the Social Media Classroom and Collaboratory. It's all free, as in both "freedom of speech" and "almost totally free beer." We invite you to build on what we've started to create more free value. The Social Media Classroom (we'll call it SMC) includes a free and open-source (Drupal-based) web service that provides teachers and learners with an integrated set of social media that each course can use for its own purposes-integrated forum, blog, comment, wiki, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets , and video commenting are the first set of tools. The Classroom also includes curricular material: syllabi, lesson plans, resource repositories, screencasts and videos. The Collaboratory (or Colab), is what we call just the web service part of it. Educators are encouraged to use the Colab and SMB materials freely, and we host your Colab communities if you don't want to install your own. (See this for an explanation of who "we" are).