Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) are a new approach to learning based on Web 2.0 and social software. PLEs recognize that learning takes place across different contexts throughout one's life and aims to provide tools to support lifelong learning. PLEs allow learners to organize their own learning using whatever tools and devices they choose. They also recognize the role of informal learning and have the potential to extend access to educational technology to anyone who wishes to organize their own learning. PLEs present a challenge to traditional education systems by supporting learner-driven and interest-based learning across distributed environments.

1. Personal
Learning
Environments
Graham Attwell

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

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

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

5. Profound innovations in technology
tend to be reflected in older paradigms

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

7. The challenge

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

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

10. My Space and Bebo

11. Web logs

12. Flickr, Second Life

13. forming and participating in on-line social networks and communities

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

15. a refusal to engage in these issues risks
school/TAFE becoming increasingly
irrelevant to the everyday lives of many
people

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

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

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

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

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

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

22. Google is the most used e-learning application

23. most learning is unaccredited

24. people learn through legitimate
peripheral participation

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

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

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

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

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

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.

31. The answers?

32. How can we support
lifelong competence
development?

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

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

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

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.

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

38. PLEs 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

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

40. Using whatever tools and devices
which the learners choose

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

42. PLEs can help in the
recognition of informal
learning

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

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

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

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

47. the PLE will challenge the existing
education systems and institution

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

49. Policies to support the development
and implementation of PLEs

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

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

52. a broader
understanding of digital
literacy and its
integration within the
curriculums

53. recognise different
forms and contexts of
learning

54. the development and
adoption of new
pedagogies

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

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