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Constructing a Personal Learning Environment theFree and Easy Way
Derek Harding
University of Teesside
Derek.Harding@tees.ac.uk
 
Introduction
Having been involved in the implementation of a commercial Virtual Learning Environmentand the staff development activities associated with it, I can say with some confidence thatthis approach has problems as well as advantages.Blackboard for example, is essentially an expensive American product and it shows.Moodle is free and more versatile but can still be used to impose particular ways ofworking. Also students often use technologies in ways that lecturers may not.Because of the plethora of tools and technologies available to us and the power of the'semantic' web to present and represent them to their publics we can now construct apersonal resource quickly and easily. In this paper I will illustrate how it is possible tosimply construct a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) using these tools andtechnologies and in doing so will argue that these more flexible approaches will be moreappropriate for the modern learner in the future.
What is a PLE?
The search for a definition of a Personal Learning Environment proved to be somewhatdisappointing.For example Graham Attwell says: “There is a buzz at events bringing togethereducational technologists. That buzz is called Personal Learning Environments… there islittle agreement on what a Personal Learning Environment is,… There is not evenagreement as to whether a PLE should be an application or if it is just a collection of user-configured tools. The best guess at the moment is the JISC view that “student control overtheir learning environment using tools that they are already familiar with” [check this on theJISC site] is at least a reasonable summary of what the projects are trying to achieve.”
1
 George Siemens says: “is every instance of using a suite of web tools a PLE? In that case,my definition of a PLE is the Internet. And what does that get us?"
2
 The issue is essentially identified by the JISC and is mainly concerned with control andfamiliarity, and therefore useability rather than functionality. The basic problem with thePLE idea is that we tend to get locked into institutional approaches to elearning rather thanmore eclectic and broad based ones which are already there in crude form at least. Thatis we tend to make students and staff use ‘corporately acceptable’ tools such as theofficially adopted VLE rather than accepting that ‘free range’ activities will take place. The
1
 
http://www.knownet.com/writing/weblogs/Graham_Attwell/entries/
6521819364 
2
 
http://www.elearnspace.org/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/1664
 
Also see Ron Lubenskyhttp://members.optusnet.com.au/rlubensky/2006/12/present-and-future-of-personal-learning.html#towards-a-definition 
 
PLE idea is in essence a valiant (and laudable?) attempt to shrug off this approach.
Approaches to building a PLE
Projects to construct PLEs have looked at producing holding software. That is softwarewhich acts as a container for a range of tools. PLEX for example does this by allowingusers to organise their resources such as local files, web links, RSS feeds, people and soon.FLOCK is similar in that it is intended to act as a container for resources, etc., but it is abrowser rather than a software package. The Elgg Personal Learning Environment mapbelow provides a good illustration of the scope of PLE projects. However, when onebegins to explore the practicalities of PLEs two aspects become apparent very quickly.The first is the complexity of the given PLE and the second is the problem that early theprototypes have in that they typically require local installation unless they are portal based.Local installation means that each machine used would need the software installed. Theportal option is better but may be susceptible to corporate branding and control activities.
 
 
Mapping a PLE
Whatever we might think about the definition of a PLE what we can say with someconfidence is that they are potentially very complex. Ray Sim's
3
mapped his learningEnvironment using mind mapping software in order to get a view of its structure.A colleague at Teesside, Emma, mapped her 'learning environment' for me too andinterestingly also included a lot of 'wetware' (wetware = people ).
3
 http://simslearningconnections.com/ple/ray_ple.html 
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02 / 11 / 2011This doucment made it onto the Rising List!
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