What is a PLE anyway? March 15, 2008
Posted by kduclos in : Personal Learning Environments (PLE), web 2.0 , trackbackA Personal Learning Environment (PLE) is to me a nebulous concept. What is it really except a bunch of resources pulled together that make sense to the person pulling them together? Every one of us has our own learning style preferences. Alan Levine describes a PLE as a cloud (and in a different posting he describes a PLE as the internet itself). When asked what was in his cloud he wrote this blog posting in response – My Network Probability Cloud … PLEase This is an interesting way to look at a PLE. He says that his “environment” is in flux and could be something different at any given moment. He names feeds, Twitter, del.icio.us, and Google Apps as “core” tools, the “heartbeat” is blog commenting, the “nervous system” is IM and synchronous communication, his “old bones” is email, and the “appendage” is Second Life. For him, this works. While I contemplate creating a PLE, I have to ask myself what would make up the “body” of my knowledge-building environment? I don’t know yet, but Mr. Levine’s description gave me food for thought.
Comments»
Interesting article, thanks for posting! Sometimes I find it funny how we try to hurry up and give names to everything (Web 2.0, PLE) as if this were a field like science where it might actually come in handy to have everyone share the same definitions. Is it so necessary to define it in the technology world? Well, I guess it is, if we want to discuss it!