http://ac.els-cdn.com/S1877042812039821/1-s2.0-S1877042812039821-main.pdf?_tid=ec48b012-91bf-11e7-aa65-00000aab0f02&acdnat=1504564094_572cb67cabdc6ea9b64914687eda00a4

Summary: In this article, Ray Archee, of the University of Western Sydney, Australia explores the possible effects, both good and bad, that Personal Learning Environments (PLE's) will have on higher education and asserts that the effects will be rather Faustian-a surge towards online learning environments and a reduction in traditional face-to-face pedagogy. Given that PLE's are generally less structured and more informal than traditional learning environments, Archee predicts that there will be a loss of employment in higher education. PLE's may also introduce various social issues because students have the capability of publishing critical content that damages the institution or its courses, other students, and faculty. Ultimately, higher education must adapt to being more critical of what it allows as acceptable PLE's and face the consequences of such a choice as a medium for e-learning.

http://www.je-lks.org/ojs/index.php/Je-LKS_EN/article/view/247/229

Summary: In this article, Scott Wilson (professor), Oleg Liber, Mark Johnson, Phil Beauvoir, Paul Sharples, and Colin Milligan of the University of Bolton, UK argue that the current design pattern education systems use for their personal learning environments does not support lifelong learning or personalization, is teacher-oriented more than learner-oriented, and therefore results in disconnecting learners from potentially effective global internet services. Instead of a model with asymmetric relationship to teachers over learners, the authors prescribe a model more symmetrical to both teachers and learners in that it includes online services for formal and informal learning and identifies strategies for implementation.

http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3559/3131

Summary: In this article, Kamakshi Rajagopal, Desiree Joosten-ten Brinke, Jan Van Bruggen, and Peter B. Sloep explore how professionals decide to establish their personal/professional networks and present a model for creating a personal learning network that addresses describing a Personal Learning Network (PLN) model and its technological needs. This model consists of a hierarchy of governing elements-Attitude contributing to Intention, Activity, and Skill in the order of most governing to least governing. Within the lowest level of governance-Skill-there are three stages to the networking process-Building, Maintaining, and Activating-all of which bring with them their own factors that influence one's decisions.

https://moo27pilot.eduhk.hk/pluginfile.php/415222/mod_resource/content/3/Learningasasocialsystem.pdf

Summary: In this article, Etienne Wenger, consultant on communities of practice (CoP's) and author of Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, argues that while CoP's for large organizations are informal and distinct from set organizational units, CoP's serve as a company's most versatile and dynamic resource that forms an organization's basis for knowledge and learning because of its capability to produce a shared repertoire of communal resources. CoP's are complex organizations that have five stages of development-Potential, Coalescing, Active, Dispersed, and Memorable-and can fall into several categories in their relationship to their respective organizations. Ultimately, CoP's are crucial to organizations who realize that knowledge is a vital asset.

http://www1.udel.edu/educ/whitson/files/Lave,%20Situating%20learning%20in%20communities%20of%20practice.pdf

Summary: In this article, Jean Lave, Ph. D. and social anthropologist, proposes that learning be a process of becoming a member of a community of practice rather than a social cognition shared to internalize knowledge. While seeing learning through social and cultural lenses has sparked discussion about socially shared cognition, Lave believes that such a perspectives can undermine the complexities of a learner's identity by imposing oversimplified boundaries between the individual and "some version" of the outside world. Rather than being restrictive, Lave prescribes a more general theory to encompass personal learning-the theory of socially situated activity. This theory centers on three strategies of inquiry-counterintuitive definitions of learning, reversed points of cultural view, and historical analysis of cognitive process.

http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/523/1103

Summary: In this article, Rita Kop of the University of Wales Swansea and Adrian Hill of Open School BC, Canada, explore various concerns about connectivism as a learning theory and argue that while these concerns exist, connectivism still plays enough of a significant role in education today that pedagogy and education should expand connectivism rather than move past it entirely.

http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/890

Summary: In this article, Terry Anderson and Jon Dron of Athabasca University, Canada determine that distance education pedagogy can be broken down into three distinct generations-cognitive-behaviourist, social constructivist, and connectivist. In order to address the learning needs of 21st Century learners, all three of these generations should be considered and utilized in the learning content, context, and learning expectations of a high-quality distance education. The authors also examine these three generations of distance education pedagogy using the common community of inquiry model.

http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1143/2086

Summary: In this article, Carmen Tschofen, a researcher and historian, and Jenny Mackness, an independent researcher, bring together connectivism with personality and self-determination theories to elucidate insights that individual experience give in connective learning environments. Such a relationship between these three theories gives place for diversity in connective learning environments-specifically individual and psychological diversity. Most of these authors connections between these theories stem from the testing and observation of massive open online courses (MOOC's). The authors arrive at the insights connectivism gives to individual experience as they explore and define the four principles of learning that connectivism embodies-autonomy, connectedness, diversity, and openness.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/4272836/towards_a_theory_of_mobile_learning.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=1504556596&Signature=F%2BhMUyJoAvIAMkNzvCLieko6X5A%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DTowards_a_theory_of_mobile_learning.pdf

Summary: In this article, Mike Sharples, Josie Taylor, and Giasemi Vavola of the University of Birmingham, UK offer a preliminary framework towards mobile learning theory through the lens of Activity theory. While this framework includes elements of infant, classroom, and informal learning, Sharple, Taylor, and Vavola elucidate a transformative effect that supporting virtual communities can produce in digital networks. Such a framework aims at initializing a cutting-edge, integrated theory of mobile learning while informing the design of emerging technologies and learning analysis.

http://www.rareplanet.org/sites/rareplanet.org/files/Communities_of_Practice__The_Organizational_Frontier%5B1%5D.pdf

Summary: In this article, Etienne C. Wenger, a consultant on communities of practice (CoP's) and author of Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, and William M. Snyder, one of the founding partners of Social Capital Group, argue that CoP's will move past mere team collaboration and become an organizational form that reinvents companies by galvanizing knowledge sharing, learning, and change. Those who participate in CoP's are informally bound through expertise and passion-whether this be through physically meeting regularly or electronic networks online. While some consider community of practice as a fad, Wenger and Snyder have observed how CoP's have drastically improved organizational performance through driving strategy, starting new lines of business, solving problems quickly, transferring best practices, developing professional skills, and recruiting and retaining talent in large corporations. Wenger and Snyder urge company managers to understand CoP's and how they work, realize that CoP's can be the main source of knowledge development, and appreciate that CoP's are informal organizational structures that need to be integrated into businesses in order to achieve their full potential for organizational improvement.

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