They sent me the questions and rather than write a long text I agreed to reply by video. The questions – see below – are excellent – in focusing on the key issues around Personal Learning Environments. I struggled with some of my answers – it would be great if anyone else could add their ideas by video or in the reply box to this blog entry.

Questions:

1. What is the pedagogical model you follow as an online teacher and why?
2. You have been developing some serious thinking on PLEs. How important are they in the learning process?
3. Do you advise your students to follow a specific  “model” or do you give them full freedom in building their PLE?
4. Ever since the concept of PLE appeared there have been several discussions about this issue and the concept itself has been evolving. In what way has the PLE interfered in the change of elearning pedagogical models? Or is the PLE merely “a tool” that you can use and take some benefit from in the already existing practices, without real influence in changing them?
5. Many Universities and Colleges offering online courses tend to adopt pedagogical models quite close to traditional teaching and learning, centred on transmitting contents in closed environments (LMS/VLE) controlled by the institution. How shall we overcome this traditional approach and persuade the universities to change their practices?
6. Elearning is becoming more and more relevant, both in formal and informal education, and it is seen as essential in lifelong learning processes. How do you see the future of elearning, bearing in mind the technological development and the social and economical changes that will come along with the evolution of society?

And it coincides with the call for papers for PLE2012, being held in Aveiro in Portugal and Melbourne, Australia. Here is a copy of the blog I wrote to launch the call.

“When we first launched the PLE conference we wanted to do something different. “Why is it that the best part of conferences is the time you spend with colleagues outside the conference?”, we asked. “How can we make the conference sessions as entertaining as the social?” “How can we encourage people to learn from each other, rather than sitting passively watching powerpoint slides?”

And we wanted the conference to be open and accessible to as many interested people as possible including young researchers.

At the same time we realised that formal paper submissions were important in gaining support from universities for travel and attendance at the conference. We also acknowledged that journal publications remain important for career development for many researchers.

So we tried to balance all these things. We issued a call for formal paper proposals but at the same time encouraged submissions in other formats – workshops, bring-a laptop demos, and pecha keucha sessions. And when we were designing the programme we tried to build in unconferencing sessions as well as more traditional formats. We also said that even if you submit a formal paper, you can still use less traditional ways of delivering that paper. We tried to support people in working together in collaborative sessions. We also invented the unkeynotes where keynote speakers were challenged themselves to find new and collaborative ways of engaging with the audience.

Even small things can make a difference. Rather than provide the usual uniform conference badges we asked participants to make their own, to reflect their PLEs.

It seems to have worked. The PLE conference is not the biggest educational technology event, neither would we want it to be. But feedback constantly refers to the warmth of the atmosphere, the mutual support and the intensity of the learning experience.

2012 sees the third PLE conference, building on the previous events in Barcelona and Southampton. And yet again this year we want to push out the boundaries – to do something new. So this year conference takes place not in one venue but in two. And although the venues are interlinked by people and personal networks they are geographically a long distance apart. The conference will take place in Aveiro in Portugal and in Melbourne in Australia on 11 – 13 July 2012. Both events share a common organising committee and call for proposals. Both events will share common electronic spaces and spaces for networking. And we are hoping that despite the time differences we will be able to share some of the sessions through the use of technology.

One conference – two venues – PLE2012 is going to be a lot of fun.

The Open Badges framework, say the project developers, is designed to allow any learner to collect badges from multiple sites, tied to a single identity, and then share them out across various sites — from their personal blog or web site to social networking profiles. The infrastructure needs to be open to allow anyone to issue badges, and for each learner to carry the badges with them across the web and other contexts.

Now some of the issues. I am still concerned of attempts to establish taxonomies, be it those of hierarchy in terms of award structures or those of different forms of ability / competence / skill (pick your own terminology). Such undertakings have bedeviled attempts to introduce new forms of recognition and I worry that those coming more from the educational technology world may not realise the pitfalls of taxonomies and levels.

Secondly is the issue of credibility. There is a two fold danger here. One is that the badges will only be adopted for achievements in areas / subjects / domains presently outside ‘official’ accreditation schemes and thus will be marginalised. There is also a danger that in the desire to gain recognition, badges will be effectively benchmarked against present accreditation programmes (e.g. university modules / degrees) and thus become subject to all the existing restrictions of such accreditation.

And thirdly, as the project roils towards a full release, there may be pressures for restricting badge issuers to existing accreditation bodies, and concentrating on the technological infrastructure, rather than rethinking practices in assessment.

Lets look at some of the characteristics of any assessment system:

The major challenge was how to classify and analyse the material. We set out with an original framework comprised of  three tiers of analytic categories:

●      A top tier with the three dimensions: “Personal”, “Learning” and “Environment”;

●     A  middle tier with two domain perspectives: “Pedagogy” and “Technology”;

●      A bottom tier with a set of core concepts and a scale from “high” to “low”.

However, the first reading and analysis of selected literature led us to the conclusion that focusing only on the three dimensions at the top tier level as described above leaves out other central aspects related to PLEs. At the same time the three original categories are too broad and encompass different notions that need further disaggregation.

Thus we decided to use Activity Theory as a basis for our analysis reasoning that the idea of PLEs places the focus on the appropriation of different tools and resources by an individual learner and there is a general agreement on viewing learners as being situated within a social context which influences the way in which they use media, participate in activities and engage in communities. Learning outcomes are considered to be created in the process of tackling the problems and challenges learners meet in different contexts by using tools and resources leading to outcomes. The perspective on learning as tool-mediated, situated, object-directed and collective activity is the basic tenet of Activity Theory (Engeström 1999; Engeström, 2001).

Overall, I think the approach works well. We found that the core concepts around PLEs such as ownership, control, literacy, autonomy or empowerment are often mentioned in the literature but seldom defined, theoretically grounded or differentiated. This obscures the overall picture and understanding of PLEs. We identified a series of ‘open research questions’:

• What types of ownership and control are relevant to PLEs?
• What motivates and demotivates learners to establish own PLEs?
• Which norms and values guide the development of PLEs in different contexts?
• What roles are played by different actors in a PLE?
• What is the relationship between ownership and collaboration in a PLE?
• How do PLEs contribute to identity development?
• How to balance power between different participants in a PLE?
• How to support the development of literacies necessary to establish a PLE?

You can read the full paper below or download a copy. We would very much welcome feedback from readers.

Thanks especially to Ilona for all the hard work she put in in getting this paper ready for publication.
Understanding Personal Learning Environments: Literature review and synthesis through the Activity Theory lens

Publikacja naukowa pod tytułem “Understanding Personal Learning Environments: Literature review and synthesis through the Activity Theory lens” została umieszczone w Webscience Journal: http://journal.webscience.org/658/

Oto pełen tytuł publikacji:

Buchem, Ilona and Attwell, Graham and Torres, Ricardo (2011) Understanding Personal Learning Environments: Literature review and synthesis through the Activity Theory lens. pp. 1-33. In: Proceedings of the The PLE Conference 2011, 10th – 12th July 2011, Southampton, UK.

Głównym pytaniem naszej pracy jest: “Czym charakteryzują się osobiste środowiska uczenia się? Jakie są ich główne cechy i w jaki sposób można je systematycznie opisać?”

Przegląd literatury jakiego dokonaliśmy oparty jest na teorii aktywności (Activity Theory). Do analizy ponad 100 publikacji odnoszących się do osobistych środowisk uczenia się posłużyliśmy się metodologią teorii ugruntowanej (Grounded Theory). Naszym celem było lepsze zrozumienie tego, czym są i jak funkcjonują osobiste środowiska uczenia się.

Oto streszczenie:

“This paper represents a scientific analysis of a broad range of publications surrounding the field of Personal Learning Environments (PLEs). Personal Learning Environments can be viewed as a concept related to the use of technology for learning focusing on the appropriation of tools and resources by the learner. Capturing the individual activity, or how the learner uses technology to support learning, lies at the heart of the PLE concept. The central research question guiding this review was: What are the characteristic, distinguishing features of Personal Learning Environments? This paper argues that PLEs can be viewed as complex activity systems and analysed using the Activity Theory framework to describe their key elements and the relationships between them. Activity Theory provides a framework of six interrelated components: subject, object, tools, rules, community and division of labour. In referencing over 100 publications, encompassing conference papers, reports, reviews, and blog articles, this paper takes an activity-theory perspective to deconstruct the way central aspects related to PLEs are addressed in different publications. The aim of this study is to create a better understanding of PLEs and to develop a knowledge base to inform further research and effective practice. The literature review presented in this paper takes a broader view on PLEs recognising that research in this field stems from different scientific communities and follows different perspectives.”

Naszą listę publikacji umieściliśmi w Wiki zatytułowanej PLEP – Personal Learning Environment Publications. W ten sposób chcemy stworzyć publiczny zbiór publikacji, który może być uzupełniany przez każdego zainteresowanego tym tematem.

Zachęcam wszystkich do składania propozycji na umieszczenie dalszych wartościowych publikacji na stronie w Wiki!

#PLE_SOU (for some reason we have adopted a hash tag convention of following airport codes!) had much to live up to. The first PLE conference in 2010 in Barcelona had created a great buzz around it. In part this may have been the excitement of a conference dedicated to PLEs, in part the wonderful people it attracted and also the great venue in Barcelona. It was also because last year we had spent considerable effort in moving away from the traditional twenty minute paper presentation, followed by five or ten minutes of discussion, to facilitating more open and interactive formats, adapting more unconferencing type approaches to exchanging ideas.

We adopted the same approach in Southampton. Not everyone is happy with such an approach and it requires considerable effort on the part of session facilitators. But just as in Barcelona, we wanted to merge the informal and formal sides of the conference and to develop an ongoing dialogue between participants.At the same time with three or four simultaneous sessions we wished to provide people with choices of different formats and with opportunities for unconferencing break out sessions if the wished. And on the whole I think it worked well.

This year too, we put considerable effort into ensuring  we had a robust technical infrastructure capable of supporting everyone being logged on with at least two devices simultaneously and providing a rolling display of tweets from the conference. We also provided a live stream from one of the four conference spaces, which attracted a surprising number of participants. Next year we will look at ways to better integrate those following the conference at a dostance.

Lisa, Su and Hugh, assisted by David Delgado have put considerable effort into the curation of the conference, with the conference web site providing access to photos, slides and videos and to a full archive of conference papers.

Now on to  the contents (based on the sessions I attended). We still have no agreement on a definition of PLEs. I am not sure this is important. There seems to be a broad consensus about PLEs as an approach to teaching and learning and within that there is plenty of room for different developments and initiatives, be it m,ore theoretical pedagogic research, surveys and empirical studies, innovation in practice or technological development. Different approaches could include the development of Personal Learni9ng Environments, institutional support for PLE development (more on that in a moment), MOOCs or support for work based learning. Having said that there was a general recognition that the adaption of a PLE approach is challenging existing institutional practices and for example present practices around assessment are a barrier to PLE implementation.

There was also considerable concern that not all learners are confident or capable of developing and managing their own PLEs. In part this concern was based on a series of different studies looking at how learners are using new technologies and particularly social software and social networking applications. These studies are valuable and it would be good if there could be some kind of sharing space for such work.

Concerns over the confidence of learners in using technology are largely behind the move towards developing ‘institutional PLEs’. There is also a move by schools to adopt such systems both because of concerns for privacy and data security with commercial applications and services and to allow access to social networking technologies for those under 13 years old.

Although most research and development presented at the conference was orientated towards higher education there appears to be increasing interest in PLEs not only from the school sector but also for learning at work and in the c0mmunity.

Perhaps the most encouraging aspect of the discussions was that we were talking about actual PLE implementations, rather than the more speculative research  and planning in Barcelona. PLEs are no longer a dream, but are increasingly being adopted for learning.

Although the paper is very much a work in progress, there are a series of ideas here which I find interesting and will return to on this blog in the future. In the meantime any feedback very welcome.

‘Jam Hot!’ Personalised radio ciphers through augmented social media for the transformational learning of d…

To listen to any of the programmes just go to http://cp2.internet-radio.org.uk/start/ravenscroft/

You can listen direct from this web page or open the stream in the music player of your choice.

We kick off next week from the Personal Learning Environments Conference in Southampton, England (#PLE_SOU) with two lunch time shows. We wil be broadcasting live interveiws, vox pops and bringing you the best of the conference live from Southampton. The shows run from from 1330 – 1400 UK Summer Time (1430 – 1500 Central European Time) on Tuesday 12 and Wednesday 13 July.

On Friday 15 July, we have a special broadcast being produced as part of a workshop with Inspire! the Education Business Partnership for Hackney, the Yo youth agency and the University of East London and sponsored by the RadioActive and G8WAY projects. More on this soon but it promises to be great fun. The programme goes out from 1530 – 1600 UK Summer Time (1630 – 1700 Central European Summer Time).

The following week we will be broadcasting LIVE from the Gary Chapman International School on Digital Transformation in Porto, an event jointly organised between the University of Porto and the University of Texas.

The summer school themes are

• Information access and open civic discourse
• Digital tools for government transparency
• Evolving Internet content regulation and the public’s right to information
• Digital media and the democratic process
• Factors influencing the growth of online civic engagement

Details of the radio show are still being finalised but we can promise you some surprise guests along with great interveiws and content for anyone intersted in digital media.

And the last stage of our summer tour takes us to SMIAF – the San Marino Arts Festival where we will be running workshops and broadcasting live from one of the city squares. If you are interested in getting involved here are more details:

Graham Attwell (UK) & Dirk Stieglitz (DE) di “Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning” e della web radio: “Sounds of the Bazaar” condurranno il workshop in occasione dello SMIAF 2011.

Insieme a loro si capirà come costruire una web radio, come produrre il materiale per il broadcasting e tutto quello che serve per trasmettere.

Il workshop prevede due incontri:
Venerdì pomeriggio a partire dalle ore 15
Sabato mattina alle ore 10,30.

***Si richiede ai partecipanti un pc, mac, laptop…personale.
Lo SMIAF non fornisce computer ma solo la connessione WIFI, gentilmente concessa da PRIMA s.r.l.

Dopo il workshop..anche broadcasting in diretta:
Sabato 6 e domenica 7 agosto in occasione dello SMIAF si potrà dare vita alla prima SMIAF web radio e trasmettere in diretta da P.zza S.Agata durante il Festival.
I partecipanti al workshop e anche al festival sono liberi di trasmettere musica, interviste, e tutto quello che ritengono bello ed interessante per quei giorni.

Per iscrizioni al workshop, invia una email a: smiaf.giovanisaperi@gmail.​com

Don’t miss these shows – there will be lots of room for participation and we are looking forward to a great summer radio tour.

On Monday 11th there are two pre-conference workshops:

• The Awareness and Reflection in Personal Learning Environments workshop
• Challenges of Designing and Evaluating Usability and User Experience for PLEs (U2X-4-PLE)

I am in Innsbruck for four days for a meeting of the EU funded research project, Mature-IP. Over the next few days I will try to report on what theproject is doing.

The Mature project has always interseted me in its approach to Personal Learning Environments. Whilst most projects based on PLEs have looked at learning within schools and univeristies, Mature looks at knowledge maturing processes in work.

And the project has adopted a user based approach working with a number of different user groups, in the UK from the Careers services, in developing and iterating a PLE based on knowledge development services. The project has also developed a series of knowledge indicators, based on these services.

Is it working? It is a little early to tell. But the project acknowledges the importance of different forms of learning leading to knowledge development and sharing in the workplace and also takes account of differences in context. The services developed have been based on the idea of represneting, modellinga nd reseeding knowledge delopment or maturing processes as seen in the diagramme above. Twenty seven services have been developed to date and can be combined in what are being called insubstatiations to take account of such contexts. I realise these may seem somewhat abstract but they have served in bridging between social and educational researchers working on the project and software develers. These services are:

Representation Services:

Content

• Content metric service: Provides a wrapper for encapsulating various content metric implementations
• Classification service: Classifies resources to a given set of categories based on their content. Classification can be improved by the help of user feedback
• Clustering Service: Groups items regarding a special feature

Structure

• Task Similarity Service: Computes the similarity between tasks
• Tag Mortality Analysis Service: analyses tags / concepts and their activity to predict their death
• Concept Relationship Analysis Service: Analyzes concept hierarchy and usage of concept for annotations to derive recommendations for adding broader/narrower relationships
• oSKOS Analysis Service: analyzes a SKOS ontology for potential redundant or missing information

Usage

• Usage Logging Service: collects usage data from the user’s interaction with the MATURE systems
• Process Tracking Service: logs process and task execution

Model Services

User

• User Modeling Service: Detects a user’s knowledge from his or her usage data
• Topical User Modeling Service: Provides an aggregated topical profile of a person

Task

• Process Monitoring Service: Provides the means to query and browse log data provided by the Process Tracking Service in aggregated form
• Process Model Refinement Service: Compares the modelled process with the actual process executions and suggests improvements on the process model based on it

Resource

• Resource Model Service: Describes resources based on usage data
• Document Similarity Service: Derives the textual similarity between two documents
• Resource Quality Profile: Creates a qualitative profile for each resource

Reseeding Services

Reseeding of Knowledge about contents

• Quality Based Resource Recommendation: Provides a set of ranked resources based on the qualitative status of the resource and quality requirements of the user
• Context Aware Notification Service: Provides information about activities related to artefacts
• Reseeding of Knowledge about SemanticsTag Recommendation Service: Provides tag recommendations to achieve a consistent personal and organisational tag vocabulary
• Keyword Recommendation Service: Provides a list of synonyms and hyponyms for tags
• Ontology Gardening Recommendation Service: provides recommendation for improving a SKOS ontology based on the ontology itself and information on its application

Reseeding of Knowledge about Processes

• Case-based Resource Recommendation Service: suggests resources based on resource-use in historical process executions.
• Historical Case Service: searches for historical cases based on a given input

Reseeding of Knowledge about People

• Expertise Analytics Service: Provides an aggregated overview and comparison of available and requested expertise based on tag assignments and search query analysis within a certain timeframe
• People Ranking Service: Provides a ranked list of people that are relevant for a given topic
• Expert Ranking Service: Based on past tag assignments (user-document-tag triple marked with a timestamp), this service recommends knowledgeable colleagues working on a specific topic
• People Awareness Service: Based on a user/person’s profile, this service recommends other persons with a similar profile

Interesting presentation by Scott Wilson. Scott says: “I think the main difference between how I see the world of devices interacting in education and some of the articles I’ve seen recently is that I assume that most of these devices are personal technologies – and because of that they will always be heterogeneous…..So the challenge for education is providing resources and activities in an open and flexible way that will work – at least in some fashion – on any device.”

Introduction: Designing personalized new media spaces to support transformational and emancipatory learning

Relatively recent research into, and definitions of, personalised learning environments (e.g. van Harmelen, 2008) have proposed new technological configurations or learning design patterns. These typically harmonise individual learner agency and initiative with a developing ecology of open web services and tools. This is the PLEs from an ‘alternative learning technology perspective’. Another and complementary way to view personalisation, that has a history beyond relatively recent technological developments, is to view ‘personlisation as practice’. In this sense, personalisation is rooted in the ‘deep’ matching and development of learners interests, experiences and motivations with their chosen informal or formal learning trajectories, that may be realized through personalised technologies. This is a psycho-social approach to personalisaton and learning technology design and use, that conceives of learning as something that grows out from the learner, rather than something that is acquired from some pre-structured, ‘external’ and ‘imposed’ curricula.

This position is particularly important when we are attempting to find technology-enabled ways to engage, retain and support the learning of disadvantaged people who are excluded, or at risk of exclusion, from traditional learning paths and trajectories. Arguably, this problem is most severe in the burgeoning numbers of NEETs (Not in Education Employment and Training) throughout the UK and Europe. Addressing the needs of these growing communities requires new and radical approaches to learning, learning design and technology-enabled practice. One foundation for a radical and technology-enabled pedagogy for disadvantaged groups is the groundbreaking work of Paulo Freire (1970).

Applying Friere to PLE design: Technical reformulation of ciphers

In Paulo Freire’s seminal work “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” (Freire, 1970), he emphasized the importance of critical engagement in and analysis of broader societal ‘cycles’ and their effects. One way to do this is through using lived culture, and praxis (action that is informed by values) as the foundational elements for developing circles that promote transformational learning. These ideas have recently been taken up within the non hierarchical, shared, creative, inclusive, safe and supported spaces called “ciphers” – which have emerged from the urban youth culture particularly around hip hop music (Wiliams, 2009).

We are currently using this cipher concept as a metaphor for designing and developing RadioActive, a hybrid of internet-radio and augmented social media platform to support the transformational learning of disadvantaged young people.

The RadioActive pilot

This presentation will describe the design, piloting and evaluation of RadioActive with NEETs in the London Borough of Hackney. The radio-social media platform is being co-designed with these NEETs and their support actors (such as youth workers and parents) in Hackney (in London). A key aspect is that the ‘going live’ aspect acts as a catalyst for community engagement and cohesion, linked to related social media activity. Put simply, the internet-radio gives a presence, real-time narrative and an energy that drives participation, interaction and content creation.

This is an innovative and participative broadcasting model that combines Open Source or easily affordable technology to create ‘the communities’ radio platform. This deliberately fuses, inspired by Web 2.0 trends, traditional distinctions between broadcaster/program planner and listener/consumer. The holistic design concept is an edutainment platform and hard to reach community combined, via the cipher approach, into a connected ‘live entity’ rather than the community being seen as a separate audience that is broadcast to.

The central idea is that this radio cipher provides the means to initially engage and retain NEETs, who can then be exposed to and participate in informal learning activities that lead to the development of skills and competencies that prepare them for Further Education or work. They develop both ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ skills through RadioActive. The softer ones relate to personal expression, the development of self-confidence and self-esteem, and the development of collaborative working skills. The harder ones involve the development of concrete digital literacy, media production, communication and organizational skills, that can exploited in other education or employment related activities. Similarly, their artefacts and competencies are recorded (e.g. in an eportfolio) or made public (e.g on the web) in ways that can be presented to potential Educators or Employers.

The proposed conference activities

This contribution will follow the collaborative and praxis driven spirit of this project and the PLE conference, through incorporating 2 related activities:
1. A presentation linked to the archive of the pilot radio show;
2. Mashup madness or a community in harmony? Live RadioActive show and DJ set during a social event at the conference, with RadioActive DJ’s mixing a set based on 1 or 2 favorite songs suggested by each delegate.

References

Friere, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Continuum Publishing.

Van Harmelen, H., Design trajectories: four experiments in PLE implementation, Interactive Learning Environments, 1744-5191, Volume 16, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 35 – 46.

Wiliams, D. (2009). The critical cultural cypher: Remaking Paulo Frieire’s cultural circles using Hip Hp culture. International, Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 2, 1, pp 1-29.

Last years conference in Barcelona attracted nearly 90 submissions, far in excess of what we expected. This year we had less, with 65 papers, symposia and workshops. I don’t think the lesser number was due to reduced interest, but rather that in the present economic climate, many researchers are finding it hard to gain funding for conferences (I will write a further blog on how we can deal with this). I suspect also that beautiful though Southampton may be, it does not match Barcelona in terms of conference pulling power! We have just finished the review procedure with all the attendant difficulties of establishing shared criteria and quality standards for reviews and persuading overworked colleagues tos pare the time for an unpaid for activity.

Out of the 65 submissions we have rejected two for not meeting the submission guidelines. A further four are ‘borderline’ and we are further reviewing those proposals. Happily the rest are considered good enough fro acceptance.

The good news – in general the standard of submissions is much higher this year than last year. I suspect there are two main reasons for this – firstly an improved common understanding in our communities around the idea of Personal Learning Environments. Last year we had problems in that in many proposals it was hard to relate the focus of the paper to the idea of PLEs – this year that relationship is much clearer. The second reason is that we extended the length of abstracts this year and that seems to have improved the quality.

But I still get the feeling that a number of submissions do not do justice to the ideas and research on which they are based. I do not find it easy writing proposal abstracts and wonder if there is some mileage in firstly a little collective thinking in what we are looking for in a proposal and how we can convey that to potential contributors and secondly a more inclusive and supporting procedure to help those – especially ‘emerging’ researchers in writing quality proposals. Any ideas welcome.

According to the conference web site they will provide key insights and understanding of what makes a PLE, from personal experience, through individual analysis and with thoughtful speculations on the future directions of this important field. “Each of our four keynotes will offer a slightly different perspective on Personal Learning Environments and each guarantees to ensure that their sessions attain the high level of interactions and audience engagement which was established with the first conference in Barcelona.”

And although, we had envisaged the conference being a one off, we have been encouraged by the feedback to organise a second conference this year. Our good friends Hugh Davis, Lisa Harris and Su White at the University of Southampton in the UK have kindly offered to host the conference. And here is the call for contributions. As last year, we particularly welcome interactive and participative formats for sessions. The conference web site can be accessed here.

Call for Papers: The PLE Conference 2011

Following the highly successful inaugural event in Barcelona (#PLE_BCN), the next PLE Conference will be held at the University of Southampton, UK (#PLE_SOU) from July 11th  to 13th 2011, and will have a lively social  programme as well as a highly interactive and innovative technical programme.

The Personal Learning Environment (PLE) Conference is intended to produce a space for researchers and practitioners to exchange ideas, experience and research around the development and implementation of PLEs – including the design of environments and the sociological and educational issues that they raise. Whilst the conference includes a traditional research paper strand, we also encourage proposals for sessions in different formats including workshops, posters, debates, cafe sessions and demonstrations aiming to sustain the dynamic and interactive discussion environment established by the opening event in Barcelona in 2010.

A Personal Learning Environment (PLE) includes the tools, communities, and services that constitute individual educational platforms learners use to direct their own learning and pursue educational goals. This represents a shift away from the traditional model of learning, and towards a model where students draw connections from a growing matrix of online and offline resources that they select and organise. To gain something of the flavour of last year¹s conference search for #PLE_BCN and see http://pleconference.citilab.eu/

CALL FOR PAPERS

Deadline Saturday 26th March

The conference organisers welcome 500-800 word abstracts for full or short research papers. Submissions for other types of presentation, such as workshops, symposia, demonstrations and installations are also encouraged. These can be submitted electronically via ConfTool http://pleconf.cs.uni-paderborn.de/ . The full guidelines for submissions can be downloaded here.

Conference themes

Conference themes include (but are not limited to):

• Theories and frameworks for Personal Learning Environments
• Technologies and software for developing Personal Learning Environments
• PLEs in Practice (case studies, approaches to using PLEs)
• Educational institutions, change and PLEs
• Pedagogical approaches to managing personal learning
• The development and management of Personal Learning Networks
• Mobile PLEs and augmented reality
• Supporting informal and contextual learning
• Using PLEs in organisations
• Using PLEs for Work Based Learning
• Mash-up PLEs
• Presentation formats
• Future visions:  Quo vadis PLE?

The PLE conference is especially looking for originality and relevancy of ideas and for creative proposals, in both form and content. Formats for publication and communication of research are two different things! Independently of the publication format you decide to contribute, full research paper, workshop etc., the organising committee encourages interactive and creative ways of communicating research.

Hence, we invite you to submit your contribution in the publication format you prefer and select your preference regarding the type of presentation  you wish to make (e.g.: round table discussion, bring your own laptop, cafe session, etc.) in the submission form. Once the review of papers is concluded, presentations will be organised by topics and session chairs will start liaising with participants regarding the organisation of their session. Our goal is to create spaces for meaningful discussions. In short, the purpose is to create opportunities for delegates to interact with each other and achieve real communication. We aim to promote dialogue and interactivity throughout the conference.

We welcome submissions and ideas for videos, photo collages, podcasts,  cartoons, posters – or any other kind of artifacts you can think of. In celebration of User Generated Content we will have a Mediacast Contest during the PLE Conference 2011 with awards for the best three mediacast productions on Personal Learning Environments.

A separate call for pechakucha sessions will be released shortly.

Review Process

All proposals will be subject to a peer review process and all proposals accepted will be published electronically with an ISSN number. In addition to the proceedings, we intend to publish selected conference papers in special editions of the journals that support the conference.
Please note that all submissions should be licensed under a Creative Commons licence.

Each registered participant may submit one full or short paper contribution to the conference, although further proposals in different formats are welcome.

Deadlines

The deadline for proposals is March 26th, 2011.
You will be notified if your submission has been accepted by April 30th.
For those submitting proceedings papers, the deadline for the receipt of the full paper is May 28th.

Final Submission Information

Full Papers
If your abstract is accepted, the full paper should be between 3000 and 5000 words. words (including references, tables and figures).

Short Papers/ Extended Abstracts
The short paper proposals are especially designed to encourage the presentation of work in progress. Short papers should be between 1500 words and 2500 words.

Workshops, Posters, Symposia, Demonstration, Installations, BringYourOwnLaptop sessions and other Formats.
Please submit your proposal indicating that you intend to make a contribution in one of these alternative formats.

I still am not sure how I feel about the academic publishing industry (for that is what it is). I am much happier with publishing in online and open journals. But I wonder if the traditional journal format best serves knowledge development. However I recognise the i9mportasnce for individual researchers in publishing their work. And although laborious, most of the reviews we received were thoughtful and helpful, although there still remain widespread discrepancies over perceptions of academic quality.

Anyway, here is the first of our edited journals, published by the online and open journal, the Digital Education Review (the second will be in International Journal of Virtual and Personal Learning Environments – to be published this Spring.

The papers in this edition are all from authors working in Spain and the journal was edited by Ricardo Torres and myself

Strategy approach for eLearning 2.0 deployment in Universities

Oskar Casquero, Javier Portillo, Ramón Ovelar, Jesús Romo, Manuel Benito



Declare-It is a tool that assists you in creating, tracking and being held accountable to your goals. For every declaration you make, Declare-It requires you to add supporters. Supporters are notified of your declaration and receive progress reports along your journey. If you start to fall off track, your supporters are sent an ALERT message. They can send you comments and even add incentives to help you stay motivated.

Sadly, Declare-It is a commercial site. Although it allows a ten day free trial, it then costs $9.99 per month. And I don’t honestly see enough people being prepared to pay that money for the site to gain critical mass. But the idea is simple enough and could easily be adopted or extended to other web tools.

Essentially all it is saying is that we set our own learning goals and targets and use our Personal Learning Networks for support. Then rather than just selecting friends to monitor our progress and receive alerts when we slip behind, as in the Declare-It app, we could select friends from our Personal Learning Network to support our learning and receive alerts when we achieve something or need collaboration.

Of course many of this will do that already using all kinds of different tools. My learning is work based, and most of this work is undertaken in collaboration with others – using email, forums or very often skype. Having said that I have  never really got on with any of the myriad task setting (lists) and tracking tools and astikll  tend to write my lists on the back of envelopes.

But rather than a separate web site like Declare-IT (which admittedly does have some Twitter and Facebook integration), I need some way of integrating Declare-It type functionality with my everyday workflow. A WordPress plug-in could be wonderful, particularly for project work.

In terms of the use of technology for teaching and learning we saw limited technical innovation. OK, the UK saw an increasing trend towards providing Virtual Learning environments (mainly Moodle) in primary schools. Applications like Google docs and Dropbox allowed enhanced facilities for collaborative work and file sharing. However neither of these was designed specifically for educational use. Indeed the main technical trend may have been on the one hand the increased use of social software and cloud computing apps for learning and on the other hand a movement away from free social software towards various premium business models. Of course mobile devices are fast evolving and are making an increasing impact on teaching and learning.

But probably the main innovation was in terms of pedagogy and in wider approaches to ideas around learning. and here the major development is around open learning. Of course we do not have a precise or agreed definition of what open education or open learning means. But the movement around Open Educational Resources appears to be becoming a part of the mainstream development in the provision of resources for tecahing and learning, despite significant barriers still to be overcome.  And there is increasing open and free tecahing provision be it through online ‘buddy’ systems, say for language learning, various free courses available through online VLEs and the proliferation of programmes offered as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) using a variety of both educational and social software. Whilst we are still struggling to develop new financial models for such programmes, perhaps the major barrier is recognition. This issue can be viewed at three different levels.

1. The first level is a more societal issue of how we recognise learning (or attainment). at the moment this tends to be through the possession of accreditation or certification from accredited institutions. Recognition takes the form of entry into a profession or job, promotion to a higher level or increased pay.
2. The second level is that of accreditation. Who should be able to provide such accreditation and perhaps more importantly what should it be for (this raises the question of curriculum).
3. The third is the issue of assessment. Although traditional forms of individual assessment can be seen as holding back more innovative and group based forms of teaching and learning there are signs of movement in this direction – see, for example the Jisc Effective Assessment in a Digital Age, featured as his post of the year by Stephen Downes.

These issues can be overcome and I think there are significant moves towards recognising broader forms of learning in different contexts. In this respect, the development of Personal Learning Environments and Personal Learning Networks are an important step forward in allowing access to both technology and sources of learning to those not enrolled in an institution.

However, such ‘progress’ is not without contradiction. One of the main gains of social democratic and workers movements over the last century has been to win free access to education and training for all based on nee4d rather than class or income. OK, there are provisos. Such gains were for those in rich industrialised countries – in many areas of the world children still have no access to secondary education – let alone university. Even in those rich countries, there are still big differences in terms of opportunities based on class. And it should not be forgotten that whilst workers movements have fought for free and universal access to education, it has been the needs of industry and the economic systems which have tended to prevail in extending access (and particularly in moulding the forms of provision (witness the widely different forms of the education systems in northern Europe).

Now those gains are under attack. With pressures on econo0mies due of the collapse of the world banking system, governments are trying to roll back on the provision of free education. In countries like the UK, the government is to privatise education – both through developing a market driven system and through transferring the cost of education from the state to the individual or family.

Students have led an impressive (and largely unexpected) fightback in the UK and the outcome of this struggle is by no means clear. Inevitably they have begun to reflect on the relation between their learning and the activities they are undertaking in fighting the increases in fees and cutbacks in finances, thus raising the issue of the wider societal purposes and forms of education.

And that also poses issues for those of us who have viewed the adoption of technology for learning as an opportunity for innovation and change in pedagogy and for extending learning (through Open Education) to those outside schools and universities. How can we defend traditional access to institutional learning, whilst at the same time attacking it for its intrinsic limitations.

At their best, both the movements around Open Education and the student movement against cuts have begun to pose wider issues of pedagogy and the purpose and form of education as will as the issues of how we recognise learning. One of the most encouraging developments in the student movement in the UK has been the appropriation of both online and physical spaces to discuss these wider issues (interestingly in opposition to the police who have in contrast attempted to close access to spaces and movement through he so-called kettling tactic).

I wonder now, if it is possibel to bring together the two different movements to develop new visions of education together with a manifesto or rather manifestos for aschieveing such visions.