Experts define personal learning environments (PLEs) as (1) personalized learning centers where students control and remix content according to their needs and interests, (2) collections of tools and conceptual notions that allow for openness, interoperability and learner control, and (3) new approaches to using technologies for learning rather than single software applications.

1. What do the experts
have to say?

2. Stephen Downes
Senior Researcher at the National Research
Council of Canada
 […] It becomes not an institutional
application, but a personal learning
center, where content is reused and
remixed according to the student’s
own needs and interests…it is an
environment rather than a system

3. Mark van Harmelen
Research fellow in Computer Science at
Manchester University
 […]are systems that help students to
take control of and manage their
own learning…It maybe composed of
many subsystems as such it maybe a
desktop application

4. Jonathan Mott
Adjunct professor of instructional psychology and
technology at Brigham Young University, Utah
 […]an educational manifestation of
the web’s small pieces loosely joined

5. George Siemens
Executive director of the Learning Innovation and
Networked knowledge Research Lab at the
university of Texas
 […]a collection of tools brought together
under the conceptual knowledge of
openness, interoperability, and learner
control. As such they are comprised by two
elements: The tools and the conceptual
notions that drive how and why we select
individual parts.

6. Grahan Attwell
Associated fellow, Institute for Employment
Research, University of Warwick and
Gastwissenschaftler at the Institut Technik und
Bildung University, Bremen
 Associated fellow, Institute for Employment
Research, University of Warwick and
Gastwissenschaftler at the Institut Technik
und Bildung University, Bremen
 […]there was no consensus on what PLE
might be…it was not a software application
it was more of a new approach to using
technologies for learning

7. Summarising
 Learning center that help students take control
 Sub-system, application, a part of a bigger thing
 Collection of tools and conceptual knowledge
coming together to craft a space to learn
 A new approach to using technologies for
learning
 An ecosystem of connected resources