7 Things you should know about... Personal Learning Environments

1. 7 Things you should know about...Personal Learning Environments 2009 EDUCAUSE

2. 1. What is it? Not a service or application; but an idea of how individuals approach the task of learning. describes the tools, communities and services that learners use to direct their own learning and pursue educational goals Learner-centric not course centric Not only online resources but all resources.

3. 2. Who is doing it? Universities: Bolton, UK University of Mary Washington, Virginia Baylor University Penn State University of British Columbia Offer a site where students can house personal reflections and digital content, return to it, share it and repurpose it in other tools – Encourages PLE’s.

4. 3. How Does It Work?

5. 4. Why is it significant? • PLEs represent a shift away from the model in which students consume information through independent channels , moving instead to a model where students draw connections from a growing matrix of resources that they select and organize.

6. 5.What are the downsides? • Personal learning environment is an evolving term, one without a single widely accepted definition. • Students are required to engage in ongoing decision making to maintain, organize, and grow their learning environments. • The process of self-directed learning requires a degree of self-awareness, and it must be given time to mature.

7. 6.Where is it going? • The PLE is a result of the evolution of Web 2.0 and its influence on the educational process. • The concept is likely to become a fixture in educational theory, engendering widespread acknowledgment of its value, both of its framework and of its components.

8. Students will find themselves increasingly work collaborative and relying on their network of contacts for information. • Students will probably more quickly develop the skill to sort the authoritative from the noise. • A few institutions may continue developing campus-specific solutions for PLEs, such as customizable portals or dashboards that help.

9. 7. What are the implications for learning and teaching? • The goal for the student shifts from a need to collect information to a need to draw connections from it—to acquire it, and collaborate in its use • The use of PLEs enable students to actively consider and reflect upon the specific tools and resources that lead to a deeper engagement with content to facilitate their learning.

10. History and Evolution • The PLE is a new concept in education. The UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)-sponsored Centre for Educational Technology & Interoperability Standards (CETIS) traces its origin to an unpublished paper by Bill Olivier and Oleg Liber produced in 2001 . (Severance, C, Hardin, J, and Whyte, A, 2008)

11. Another article suggested that (PLEs) originally surfaced in 1998 when Media Lab in Helsinki released the first version of FLE, Future Learning Environment. (Henri, F, & Charlier, B, 2010)

12. The first recorded use of the term was at the JISC/CETIS Conference 2004, referring to a set of different applications, services, and learning resources gathered by learners from a variety of contexts.

13. The Association of Learning Technology Conference 2006, “Most people agree that it is not a software application. Instead, it was suggested that it could be envisaged as a new approach to using technologies for learning. Since then, many research projects have emerged with various types of PLE applications” (Henri, F, & Charlier, B, 2010)