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Short description
The concept of a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) is where you look at the learner’s learning environment as a whole, including both the formal and informal learning.
Process description
Looking at PLEs, you need to look at the environment the a person learns in, both containing the formal learning, such as school, college, or courses and the informal earning, which is what is learned outside of formal learning institutions. If a learner realises what his or her PLE looks like, it can be useful in optimizing how they learn.
The use of PLEs in education requires the learner to take a personal responsibility for what he/she learns. The idea is that the learner will use his/her own preferred learning methods for gathering information and building up qualifications. Some may prefer reading about it, some prefer trial and error, and some might choose to hunt the Internet for information. How the learner gains the information is up to him/her, the important thing is that he gets the information needed to achieving the desired knowledge.
This is the core of using a PLE that the learner is allowed to set his/her own learning style as opposed to going to a course with an evaluation at the end. The evaluation still happens, but in a way designed to test out the qualifications required to pass the evaluation. This evaluation needs to be flexible enough to let the learners show how they’ve gained the required skills, including going through how they got the information.
Adopting PLE use will have an effect on who is in control of what to learn, how to do it, and what tools to use. Traditionally, these things are decided by the teacher, but the PLE approach is learner-based, which means that the role of teacher becomes that of an instructor or guide that can help the learners in the right direction, but keeping in the background as the learners discover knowledge on their own.
It is not uncommon for PLE users to turn to web based searchers, or to have them engage in Web 2.0 content such as blogs, wikis, and social networking sites.
Required resources
A PLE isn’t so much a thing as it’s an idea and a culture. As such, it requires only goodwill and time. While you can add web 2.0 or other tools to the mix, the core is the culture.
Examples
Comments
This example is developed in relation to the two EU projects COMBLE (http://comble-project.eu/) and EATRAIN2 (http://www.eatraining.eu/)
Reflection
CategoryMethopediaActivity PSI: http://psi.methopedia.eu/learning-activity/personal-learning-environment
