Implementing Elgg in HE :: Blog :: Personal Learning Environments

As I'm about to do a presentation at our Learning & Teaching conference on all this stuff, I thought I'd use Elgg to:

1. Rehearse some of my arguments
2. Blog the presentation itself
3. Use it as a means of summarising stuff that's useful for this community

So here's a quick summary on PLEs:

We’re currently seeing much discussion about Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) – a concept based around the emergence of both web 2.0-based technologies which enable distribution, sharing and collaboration; desktop tools that allow the creation of rich content and mobile applications that allow interaction on the move. All the various definitions of PLEs appear to agree that core to the concept of a PLE are:

• A suite of personal tools chosen by the learner
• The ability for the leaner to access, gather together and organise materials in ways that support their personal style of learning
• The interchange of information in common standards that support sharing, cross referencing and collaboration between disparate learners
• A personal environment that crosses institutional, geographic and temporal boundaries

The notion of a PLE is, in many senses, a coming together of a variety of ‘happenings’ that have been ongoing for a few years now:

Educational stuff

ePortfolios – there’s been a national drive for all HE institutions to consider the use of ePortfolios and support the personal development process. Generally, technical solutions have focussed on relatively rigid, database-driven systems that deliver some kind of formal output – the online CV to generalise it wildly. Yet no single technology can really cater for all the needs of an ePortfolio – it is, by its very nature, a collection of disparate things from a variety of sources. So, the notion that a PLE is a tool set that allows the collection of a wide variety of learning materials can easily extend to having a front facing entity which is the ePortfolio – the stuff from your collection that you choose to present to specific audiences.

Life Long Learning – another national drive and one that has challenged IT administrators for some time. Yes, we do offer CPD courses but no, we don’t keep student accounts and don’t make it hugely easy for students to cross institutional boundaries. Students are definitely part of the institution and, in many senses, so is their learning. PLEs offer a real opportunity for life long learning to become a reality where all the learning is managed and maintained by the learner,  not the institutions through which they obtain the learning.

The VLE model - contrast the concept of a PLE to that of the standard VLE or MLE. VLEs are most commonly institutionally ring-fenced (if you’re not a member you don’t get in). Control lies firmly with the staff and very little real control (or even contribution) takes place by students and there are almost no social aspects – VLEs are generally a thing of academia and not people. In a VLE, the centre of the university is the instituion. In a PLE, the centre of the universe is the individual learner.

Technical stuff

Mobiles – The almost ubiquitous nature of mobile communications now means an individual can access information from anywhere and now means their personal toolkit extends way beyond the physical confines of their desktop

Web 2.0 - web services, XML, RSS – all add up to  information sharing, collaboration and communication but, inparticular, to the ability for systems and information to interrelate and make the idea of a PLE a means of making sense and gathering together appropriate learning materials a reality.

Apple – consider the resurrection of Apple. A few years ago it was a company making multi-million dollar losses and slated by market analysts as dead in the water. So what did Apple do? It introduced the iMac – the first computer to have style. The first computer to be desired as an object for the home. Then they introduced the iPod that revolutionised the world of music and now they have iLife – a suite of products explicitly designed to make the creation of rich and entertaining material easy and fun. In short, the crossed the chasm and brought computers into the realms of both fashion and entertainment. And others followed their lead. The computer now has the same status in the home as the TV. Mobiles and PDAs have style implications as well as functional communication factors. The tools that were once beige boxes for work have now become symbols of fun, family and play. The barriers between work and social lives have all but gone and everyone who buys a new PC has the wide range of tools they need to access, create and distribute.

Social stuff

The rise of user contributed and user shaped web services – Wikipedia, blogs, Flickr, delicious, dig have, effectively, signalled a social revolution – the users have taken control. No longer is the world of technology and, more significantly, the web the domain of the beard and sandals brigade (aka the programmer) – one of the great strengths of the emerging technologies is user control. And people have voted with their feet and are still doing so. We’re now seeing an ever changing landscape of services and technologies that are evolving at significant speed and responding to user demands with an immediacy never seen before.

Added to this is the fact that the computer is no longer regarded as a tool of work but an object of style, creation and entertainment and the barriers between learning & fun/academic and social life/ formal and informal learning have all but disintegrated. Tools once considered as purely social (e.g. blogs) now have a real place in learning. Tools that support informal learning and social communication are coming to the fore. In short, the mix is getting bigger and the PLE concept just embraces all this stuff as more tools to support learning.

Where do I buy a PLE?

PLEs don’t exist as a single entity or product. In one sense, no-one has created a PLE (in the way WebCT, Blackboard or Moodle can claim to have created VLEs) and yet, by implication we’ve all created our own. In many senses, the concept of a PLE, rather than being something tangible we can point at, is simply an aid to help us consider the nature of the personal tool set, what tools are being used, what are needed and how they are glued together.

However, if there is a system out there that can provide the focus for a PLE it's Elgg - which is one of the main reasons for us chosing it. However, the exciting thing as far as I'm concerned, is that Elgg goes beyond the personal and fosters the formation of communities and informal groupings and, hopefully, encourages a sense of community amongst staff and students thats far greater than it is now.