Whilst the PLE concept is taking shape outside of school in the form of Google’s various apps and Windows Live etc there are some key barriers to its implementation in schools which are all around control and budgets.

1. Schools need to protect children from the dangers of the internet, true, but most have interpreted this as trying to control what children gain access to rather than providing training starting from an early age. The aim of schools should be to safely enable the use of as wide a variety of tools as possible. Trying to control children’s use of the internet is almost impossible and more than likely not desirable anyway. Providing a walled garden just creates false security or completely closed systems that encourage children to explore elsewhere. The solution is structured training from an early age on how to use the full internet with extra functions arising from need.

2. The next barrier to adoption is curriculum delivery. There is a lot spoken about personalisation but teachers are not trained for environments in which every child is operating at different levels with different interests managing their own learning. What if they don’t choose to learn about “ox-bow lakes” or heaven forbid they miss out “the Victorians”! The solution is either a competency based curriculum in which children can be recognised for their own interests or alternately, if we really do feel some content is essential to life, longer project times with less restricted outcomes or approaches so teachers really can be facilitators not lecturers.

3. The final barrier is assessment. If everyone needs to sit a test on a certain day and it contains a very restrictive set of skills and knowledge then who wouldn’t prepare the child for it? If children or adults are gaining huge social skills or collaborative skills online but the school and the individual cant gain recognition for these then they wont invest time or resource in them and they will be sidelined. We have to address assessment of the competencies we all know are so vital to successful living. Computers can’t assess these skills because if we can write an algorithm for a computer to assess these skills then we can probably write one for the computer to carry out these skills so any job using them could be replaced. These skills have to be assessed by another human being or group of human beings which is where web 2.0 comes in.

Take all this together and the PLE needs to have
- automated increasing access to more of the web based on readiness
- competency framework to allow recognition of achievement regardless of which content you choose
- authenticated peer assessment methods so whenever you complete something you are proud of you can gain some recognition that can be used as qualifications are now
- generate opportunities for publication, sharing and face to face praise.

We put all this together into PbyP and it is working really well for the 10,000 children on it but is still falling victim to the fact that at the end of the day most schools don’t really trust children with their own learning even though the research suggests 85% of it doesn’t happen in schools. When we crack the mistrust we will wonder why we ever thought we needed VLEs in the first place.

Here in Australia – at least in some small pockets of educational activity – the individuality of personal learning environments is really important as it allows the freedom of choice and the self-managing, multi tasking and always ‘on’ explorers (our younger student cohort).

In a recent project team we were focussing such students on the importance of creating self-promoting artefacts and displaying them professionally online, rather than considering how they should modify and personalise any digital portfolio sofware available in their learning institutes.

Some students have found it rewarding to create their own web spaces (blogs,wikis, networks) in which they get to choose how to structure their own personal learning environment. This enables them to have a truly portable PLE and one that may be easily sustained once their schooling is completed.

I agree with the article, it is indeed all about how the learner makes use of the Web 2.0 tools and great strides are being made in Australian education in their use – children as young as Grade 3 & 4 are increasing their ability to reflect, collect, connect and comment. Yes, to some extent teachers are leading them, but in others it is happening regardless.

I believe we are seeing an emergence of self-regulated social networking in use as the main vehicle for establishing a digital identity – a lasting footprint in the global classroom.

The term PLE is not new and prefaces Web 2.0 by possibly a decade. For those of us who still belive, particularly in schools, that there is a place for the VLE in education, ie a Managed Learning Platform, close-coupled to the MIS and providing appropriate remote access; the PLE has a different meaning. VLE suppliers understand the PLE to be that interface uniquely available to an individual learner: it recognises the prefered accessibility interface in terms of fonts, colours, images etc; through diagnostic or profiling tools it can suggest appropriate learning styles and resources etc. Such an environment could quite easily include both Open Source and Social Software. Given responses from the learner the PLE can then suggest areas for further study or alternative routes for learning etc. Such an interface will also suggest appropriate times for formative or sumative feedback and all the still unimagined tools of a truly semantic Web 3.0 environment. This is my understanding of a PLE.

If the two different definitions are so disparate is it not time that we agreed to differ and for Graham Attwell to rename his recently invented pet acronym?

Kindest Regards, Ray T

P: http://www.raytolley1.xfolioworld.com
B: http://www.efoliointheuk.blogspot.com/
W: http://www.maximise-ict.co.uk/eFolio-01/htm

Paulo

Bill