Group items tagged

Terry Anderson discusses the relative advantages and disadvantages of a PLE and VLE (LMS). This was in 2006 when Anderson was hoping that "Nonetheless, the PLE future seems to be more secure than that of any monolithic LMS. I suspect the LMS systems that survive will do so by opening themselves to standards based enhancements, service requests and the strong evolutionary move towards real learner centric educational applications." Four years on, it hasn't happened yet and if anything the monolithic LMS, at least as exemplified by Blackboard, is still fairly closed ... or where open, open only to incoming information.

A weakness for me of this paper is that the comparison does not seem to be comparing like-for-like. A tabular presentation might have been more helpful.

An important contribution the the PLE v LMS debate that will be the focus of Week 2. Dave Cormier says that "The PLE/LMS debate is not about autodidacticism, it's about the decentralization of power". Dave and commentors Michael Feldstein and Alan Levine see a a role for institutions, educators and even an LMS in the "brave new world" of the PLE.

A counter argument to the "Advantages of an LMS" from Anderson (2006) from the Collaborative Understandings blog. In the interests of balance I should state that the author doesn't comment of Anderson's "Advantages of a PLE".

Some more Three Letter Acronyms to guide us into week 2. Here we have ILE (Informal Learning Environment) and FLE (Formal Learning Environment). The ILE uses a wiki for knowledge aggregation, a forum (or microblogging tool like Yammer) for discussions and a set of profiles for documenting expertise or (human) points of contact for informal learning. (A commenter added Google custom search). The FLE includes a Learning Management System (LMS) for managing formal learning, assessment, etc. and a reports database for recording formally assessed competencies, compliance etc. The idea is that learning would take place in the ILE and formal assessment of competencies be recorded in the FLE. The model is aimed at corporate training but could be adapted for higher education. From "Learning in the Corporate Sector" by Ryan Tracey.

"There has been lots of discussion this week about whether Personal Learning Environment (PLE) and/or Personal Learning Network (PLN) are the right terms to describe what this is all about and some recognition that this a semantics issue. According to Rita Kop PLE is a UK term and PLN an American term. Dave Cormier questions whether the term personal should be used at all. Stephen Downes points out that personal is an OK term if you think about [Personal Learning] Network as opposed to [Personal] Learning Network - and similarly for PLE. I like that - but for me, the words are not as important as the process - although I can see that the process needs nominalising for ease of reference. If I am going to think about introducing the idea of PLEs/PLNs to my colleagues or students then I will be talking about the process and the implications of this process for learning rather than what we should call it, i.e. why it might be preferable for students to learn in environments/spaces of their own choice rather than be confined to an institutions VLE/LMS."

Nice comparison of PLE and an institutional VLE (or LMS) -- in this case Blackboard -- based on what Gabi Witthaus wants to do with her PLE. In conclusion the VLE is seen has constraining so maybe it's the freedom to choose that puts the 'P' in PLE.

'What the heck is a PLE and why would I want one?" -- mircobiologybytes.com. @AJCann attempts to define a PLE and contrast it with VLE. Includes a SlideShare presentation. A topic likely to come up again in week 2.

Workplace learning

From facilitator Dave Cormier -- "The concept of the Personal Learning Environment in all of its wondrous forms has been one that I've struggled with over the last four or five years that I've been familiar with it. I'm very excited to be taking part in the PLENK10 course in order to take the time to focus on these ideas and get a clearer sense of what I mean by the word. I would add, that I think this is one of the central values of an open course… it provides the opportunity to bring clarity to a subject in a field… even if we end up with different clarities"