Personal Learning Environments

Slide 1: Personal Learning Environments Learning Environments Graham Attwell

Slide 2: Personal Learning Environments - a concept based on Web 2 .0 and social software

Slide 3: We are at present undergoing a deep and prolonged industrial revolution based on digital technologies

Slide 4: The reform and reshaping of social systems and institutions has tended to lag behind in periods of rapid technological change

Slide 5: Profound innovations in technology tend to be reflected in older paradigms

Slide 6: for example the ‘virtual classroom’ or the ‘Virtual Learning Environment’

Slide 7: The challenge

Slide 8: It is not the development of technology per se which poses such a challenge to education systems and educational institutions

Slide 9: but the changing ways in which people are using technologies to communicate and to learn and the accompanying social effect of such use

Slide 10: My Space and Bebo

Slide 11: Web logs

Slide 12: Flickr, Second Life

Slide 13: forming and participating in on-line social networks and communities

Slide 14: The reaction of education systems and institutions to the rise of social networking has been at best bewilderment, at worst downright hostility

Slide 15: a refusal to engage in these issues risks school becoming increasingly irrelevant to the everyday lives of many young people

Slide 16: and particularly irrelevant to the ways in which they communicate and share knowledge

Slide 17: Web 2.0 allows young people to be active co- creators of knowledge

Slide 18: We have to review the industrial schooling model including the organisation of institutions and pedagogy and curriculum

Slide 19: It is not just young people who use social software for learning

Slide 20: Social software is widely used in the workplace for informal learning

Slide 21: Most informal learning is learner driven, problem based, or motivated by interest

Slide 22: Google is the most used e-learning application

Slide 23: most learning is unaccredited

Slide 24: people learn through legitimate peripheral participation

Slide 25: Knowing is .... located in relations among practitioners, their practice, the artefacts of that practice, and the social organization…of communities of practice Lave and Wenger, 1991

Slide 26: Lurking is a means of becoming integrated in distributed communities of practice

Slide 27: In such communities of practice formal learning materials are seldom used

Slide 28: We have ignored the vast potential of freely available ‘objects’ of all kinds for learning purposes.

Slide 29: changes in the way in which we learn and develop new competences is a challenge to our traditional subject organisation

Slide 30: And although most countries have adopted a rhetoric of lifelong learning, there is little sign that education systems have sufficiently changed to facilitate such a movement.

Slide 31: The answers?

Slide 32: How can we support lifelong competence development?

Slide 33: Personal Learning Environments have the potential to meet such a challenge

Slide 34: PLEs are not another substantiation of educational technology but a new approach to learning

Slide 35: A response to pedagogic approaches which require that learner’s e-learning systems need to be under the control of the learners themselves.

Slide 36: and recognise the needs of life-long learners for a system that provides a standard interface to different institutions’ e-learning systems, and that allows portfolio information to be maintained across institutions.

Slide 37: Learning is now seen as multi episodic, with individuals spending occasional periods of formal education and training throughout their working life.

Slide 38: PLE are based on the idea that learning will take place in different contexts and situations and will not be provided by a single learning provider

Slide 39: the idea of a Personal Learning Environment recognises that learning is continuing and seeks to provide tools to support that learning

Slide 40: Using whatever tools and devices which the learners choose

Slide 41: It also recognises the role of the individual in organising their own learning

Slide 42: PLEs can help in the recognition of informal learning

Slide 43: PLEs can develop on the potential of services oriented architectures for dispersed and networked forms of learning and knowledge development.

Slide 44: “the heart of the concept of the PLE is that it is a tool that allows a learner (or anyone) to engage in a distributed environment consisting of a network of people, services and resources. It is not just Web 2.0, but it is certainly Web 2.0 in the sense that it is (in the broadest sense possible) a read-write application.” Stephen Downes, 2006

Slide 45: The promise of Personal Learning Environments could be to extend access to educational technology to everyone who wishes to organise their own learning.

Slide 46: The ‘pedagogy’ behind the PLE – if it could be still called that – is that it offers a portal to the world, through which learners can explore and create, according to their own interests and directions, interacting at all times with their friends and community

Slide 47: the PLE will challenge the existing education systems and institution

Slide 48: New forms of learning are based on trying things and action, rather than on more abstract knowledge.

Slide 49: Policies to support the development and implementation of PLEs

Slide 50: encouraging and supporting the development of communities of practice and engagement in those communities

Slide 51: decisions over funding and support need to be taken as close to practice as possible

Slide 52: a broader understanding of digital literacy and its integration within the curriculum s

Slide 53: recognise different forms and contexts of learning

Slide 54: the development and adoption of new pedagogies

Slide 55: the co-shaping of technologies bringing together techies and teachers, enterprises and institutions

Slide 56: Thanks for Listening Wales Wide Web -www.knownet.com/writing/weblogs/Graham_Attwell