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.

Personal Learning Environments are a compelling concept and one that makes huge sense whatever angle you look at it from. However, I can’t help feeling there’s something missing or simply something wrong with the terminology? We cannot escape the fact that, in order to learn, we need other people. Both formal and informal learning requires human interaction – whether that be the words of someone written down, media others have created or the acknowledgement from others of our grasp of concepts.  So, personal learning also requires others. Equally, and perhaps more importantly, the PLE concept focuses on the individual learner. All well and good, but the concept (or perhaps just the name) doesn’t give great emphasis to the fact that individuals contribute to the learning of others. Whilst PLEs clearly accept the importance of the networks learners establish in supporting their own learning, there’s also the significant fact that the very nature of the emerging technologies that support PLEs also play a huge role in allowing each learner to help others learn – the community nurturing learning and giving rise to an almost greater conciousness that helps support, develop and nourish learning amongst all the community participants.

Think of this as a series of layers. There’s the learner at the foundation. The learner has their tools that form their PLE. Learners/PLEs come together and interact in communities of common interest. Each learner may be a member of numerous communities. Across all these networks, information, experience and opinion is being shared. Each individual can bring together relevant materials to meet their own personal learning objectives but surely these communities add more to learning than just feeding individuals – surely they lay the foundations for new learners to learn, for experts to further develop ideas and concepts and for practitioners to use as resources in other contexts?

I think there are two key things missing from the PLE concept that add huge weight to the power of social technologies to support learning:

• A notion – that each individual contributes to the learning of others and consideration of how that may be recognised and what tools are needed to best foster this aspect of the system
• A set of protocols and supporting technologies that explicitly enable new participants to join communities and access that shared learning

So how does the user and/or the community of learners make sense of this? Is there a whole that’s greater than the sum of the parts? Is there something wider that helps learners see the wood from the trees?

Imagine entering the blog sphere for the first time, like walking into one enormous library with people talking everywhere. You have a task – to find something about a specific topic. You have no librarian to guide you. You may have a search tool that, at best, might guide you to the right shelf. But the books on that shelf aren’t books – they’re people chatting to each other (generally in mid-conversation), having social conversations AND academic debates. Do I butt in? Who should I ask for guidance? Who’s word should I trust? How do I use this library? Where are the tools? Do these people know everything and I know nothing? Am I making a fool of myself? Should I say something, if so, what about? I don’t understand the terminology? Where should I start? What relates to what? Why are those two shelves talking to each other? Where’s the floor plan? Do they have a library catalogue? How do I use it? Can I have a guide?.

Of course, someone’s bound to have thought of all this already and, if so, this is a perfect example of what I’m talking about – when faced with the information jungle it’s like the predator faced with the herd – mass confusion blurring the focus on the target. I need someone to hold my hand and clear sign posts to  get me started and keep me going in finding the information and using the system.

So, how do online communities help their participants and those considering participation? Join a community of any sort and what might you expect if you ask for help?

• Silence – no-one’s interested in newbies
• Silence – everyone is expecting everyone else to answer
• Silence – the community is no longer active
• Silence – “I think I know the answer but don’t want to say it out loud in case I show my ignorance”
• Someone gives you a great first starting point to get you up-to-speed
• You get loads of different answers
• You get sent links to loads of stuff in loads of other communities
• You get flamed for asking
• You get told to RTFM or read all the previous postings

Equally:

• Where are the signposts?
• Where are the info labels at the end of each shelf?
• How do I tell what ‘status’ other members of the community have (e.g. who are the other beginners, intermediates or of a similar standing to me)?
• Who will act as a guide?
• Are there any prerequisites for joining the community?
• How does this community relate to other communities?
• Is there a classification system for the information available (what’s a good starting point, basic definitions, shared glossary?

At this point I’m not completely sure whether I’m introducing a new concept here or simply posting a plea for help but it does strike me that there’s a wider entity beyond the PLE and VLE – the idea of sharing learning – helping others in a mutually supportive community to foster learning and encourage participation – to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts – a shared learning environment.

It just might be possible, with the right standards and protocols, to simply view the SLE as the logical extension of a PLE – the sum of all the communities and resources a learner is interested or participating in where the dotted lines of knowledge and expertise, tasks and evidence can be brought together into an organised oneness that both supports the learner to learn and enables them to contribute effectively to the learning of others. I guess what I’m really talking about here is more a set of agreed social interaction protocols and the technical creativity required to make them work?

So what has my last post got to do with implementing Elgg at the University of Brighton? We already have an effective VLE that does the course/module structure very well – it might even be argued we don’t need the communities side of Elgg as we already do course communities very well. However, the really exciting thing for me about introducing Elgg is the the community stuff. Our VLE explicitly locks out students and staff not registered on a specific course and I just can’t help feeling there’s so much potential for learning ACROSS courses and ACROSS institutional barriers. Within a course structure there are clearly identified guides in a variety of forms. There’s the course handbook or module descriptor – the core documentation describing content, learning outcomes and assessment criteria and, of course, there’s the tutor(s) – who act explicitly as expert guides through the learning process. But if you want to go beyond these barriers to allow individuals to best organise their personal learning and contribute to the learning of others BEYOND the confines of the course structure, then you face the possibility of losing those explicit guides.

So what we need are some guidelines of our own to help us realise the potential of all this and help people find their way round the stuff as it mounts up and gets interesting. Here are some simple suggestions/starters as to what we can do now and some ideas as to features Elgg might add to make this work in the future:

1. Some standard content in the profile for each community (I've changed the profile of this community as a first attempt at an example)
2. Structuring the files area appropriately (done here as well although there's not a lot to organise)
3. Highlighting active and new communities on the home page
4. Random highlighting of communities on the home page in a similar way to elgg.net does for profiles
5. If communities have a dashboard in the same way individuals do in Elgg 0.7, then we can consider creating a default community dashboard that has standard signposts
6. Perhaps encourage the use of standard keywords (e.g. starting point, core concept, interesting idea etc etc)

Now, given Elgg is probably the only single piece of technology that could act as the foundation of a PLE AND Elgg’s great strength is fostering the creation of communities, are there things that can be added/changed to better support the sharing of learning (note absence at this stage of any reference to the Elgg road map – I’m in mid-flow and don’t want to get side-tracked, so much of this stuff may well already be there)? Whilst writing this, Katie has shown me http://www.minti.com - a parents support site. Supports the key word here as the whole ethos appears to be one of providing advice and supporting fellow parents. This is very much what I've been rambling on about in the last post and this one - the idea of communal support, so I've added some of the key features below as interesting possibilities for future features with Elgg

1. Bringing all the stuff together – v0.7 wireframe – the thing that really excited me about Elgg 0.7 is the integration with other systems – the ability for users to pull in stuff from their other blogs, Flickr, and other social technologies – a great starting point for the focus of a PLE and, presumably capable of being added to the shared mix for others.
2. Hyperlinked glossary that community can add to/edit
3. User voted categories/ranking (e.g. “good for beginners”, “intermediate”, “expert”, “start here” / tag clouds based on  these categories
4. Simple mechanisms for experts/tutors to be able to construct structure and provide useful guides through the information
5. Community-driven structural standards (e.g. what’s this about, where to start, what are the rules? Sign-posts etc
6. Community-led guides (nominated helpers/guides/welcomers)
7. Community-driven standard categorisations (e.g. for beginners, intermediate etc)
8. Meta structure? – Indications of how stuff links together, where most of the conversation is happening, what are the hot topics, who’s talking about what etc
9. Community activity indicator (e.g. is this dead, very active or occasional)
10. Personal rankings for each participant within a community (e.g. I'm a beginner at this, I'm an expert etc) - these being controled by the user rather than necessarily automated to indicate activity such as eBay rankings

You can access my presentation slides from "Blogatstic Smashey" here: 

 

Blogtastic Smashey

Katie and I have been mulling over issues around guiding people to useful stuff and how we can configure the home page as a really useful starting point for all users.

Having had a very productive meeting this morning with some of the staff keen on using Elgg next year, I've decided to do a first sketh of what the home page might look like - not necessarily from a design point of view but more the content and functionality.

 

So - here it is, it's too big to display in line but I don't want to reduce it as the text might become unreadable.