I - PLE - a balancing act between L, E & T; - or PLE and the Question of Sustainability
In the tribe language of the standards community we talk about LET standards, the three letter acronym expanding to Learning, Education and Training. We develop specifications as if this was one domain. It is not, although the three domains keep trying to invade each other. The pedagogues of the L domain cling to Activities, Communication and Learner-Centeredness, which resounds not too well with the administrators of the E domain. They champion their belief of education as rhetorical activity that needs to be managed and controlled, and are happy to welcome the T domain's ready bottled SCORM content to be played to the learners with a direct feedback from the certification scheme. We all know to tick Learner-Centered Pedagogy in our multiple choice tests on the political correct way to knowledge, but how many put learning and teaching style at the top of their list when they choose university? Betamax was better than VHS, and now we use neither... How do we avoid PLE becoming the Betamax of e-learning?
A pedagogically sound model
If you are looking for the ultimate "proof" of the pedagogical soundness of the PLE model, you might go the "Hole in the Wall experiments" of the Indian dr. Sugata Mitra (http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/). He installed computers in remote villages all over India that had never heard about e-learning, did not know any English and had never seen a PC.
He returned six month later and learnt that the children had picked up both language and ICT skills. They had even learnt more than the pure mathematics of computer - learner exposure time should allow. So the introduction of computers meant a transition of the educational process into a self-organising system. This might be one solution to the massive educational challenge a continent like India is facing. (India needs ten time more schools than today, which means that just the training of teachers will take 40 years!). And self-organising systems might be the solutions to accomodate the computer literate gobal villagers that are alienated by our educational institutions. But will it be the solution for higher education?
The PLE model is learner-centered and built upon the view of learning as integration. In Nordic pedagogy Activity Theory (AT) has a strong position. AT builds on four principles: 1: Activities are mediated by artefacts; 2: Actions are goal oriented; 3: Individual actions takes place within a collective context; and 4: Gaps, tensions and conflicts are driving forces of activities.
The PLE model fits well within this framework. Ownership of tools (artefacts) and participation in a community are essential to be able to engage in meaningful activities according to this theory. The PLE model is contrary to the one-tool-fits-all idea inherent in many of the VLEs and other technologies presently rolled out in schools and universities. The PLE model also (at least in my interpretation) stresses the importance of externalisation (e.g. blogging, sharing) as part of the learning activities. This is very much in line with AT thinking and in opposition of the traditional transmissive model of education.
The PLE model also fits well with the media culture of today where students must be able to exchange, express and explore using digital artefacts in a way that is not catered for in our traditional university culture. In this respect the Personal Learning Environments have the potential to bridge the learners' digital strategies for coping socially and culturally, and their formal learning.
With potential for failure
The JISC-CETIS remit is higher ed. What do universities care about the next generation students, disruptive innovation and pedagogical sound practices? The success of VLEs in universities and now also in secondary schools is not so much about support for learning as about control and administrative efficiency. The business of higher ed is certification. Then you need to keep track of your students and their task completion as an individual activity. The VLE vendors that fixed the integration with Student Management Systems won the market. In Norway VLEs are rolled out wall-to-wall in all universities and colleges; surveys show that they a mostly used for administrative purposes.
If PLEs are going to be taken up by universities I am quite sure that certain institutional needs must be addressed. The institutions will ask questions like
• If the students are left to set up their personal learning environment themselves, how could we control attendance, delivery of assignments, passing of test etc.?
• How do we guarantee that all students are getting connected, that not anybody is left out because of lack of access, difficult user interface, training etc.?
• If students are going to use their own e-mail, public file sharing services etc. how do we know that we could trust these services when the exams are closing in?
One thing is for sure, if the transition from ILEs to PLEs (I as in Institutional) is going to succeed we must plan for a smooth ride for the administrators and teachers – and the students will follow...
II - PLE vs. VLE & ePortfolio systems
VLEs are first generation e-learning systems. They are now challenged by ePortfolio systems, especially those which support transitions between educational systems and institutions, e.g. systems that support life long learning.
ePortfolios are centred around the learner's organising activities. So are the PLEs. I would think that the PLE and ePortfolio environments share most of their patterns. ePortfolio systems are just in their infancy, but there is quite a diverse community of stakeholders out there all trying to make sense of the ePortfolio concept. If PLEs are going to emerge as an important aspect of future e-learning, we have to deal with some of the same issues that ePortfolios systems face. For instance, the ownership, control and storage of the huge amount of personal learning data must be handled on a personal, rather than a institutional level. When you enrol at a university you will not any longer accept that the institution tells you to forget all your previous learning experiences (and gathered material) to immerse yourself in a institutionally controlled environment with a new user interface and organisational principle.
III - An example of a PLE - Portfolio.no
A duopoly of the VLE vendors Fronter and it's learning is ruling the market in Norway. They have been very adaptive to the needs of teachers both in higher education and in schools, integrating new tools into their platforms on demand. We see now that new companies enter the scene with new approaches, some directed towards more specialised needs, exploring the open source model of software development.
Portfolio.no has not yet launched its new learning environment. A beta version will be available later this year in Open Source, built on Linux, Apache, PostgresSQL and Perl. What is interesting here is the justification the publishing house Grieg Multimedia gives for developing a new "learning environment and authoring tool for the schools".
• "You are master in your own house" - The users have full control over their own resources - and decide who will have access to their stuff. "The system gives new ways to produce, distribute and administer learning objects, wherever you are in the learning chain, as a publisher, author, teacher or student."
• Communication and co-operation tools as blogs, wikis, Instant Messaging, syndication are part of the system
• All objects are available as XML for transportability and transformation
These are design principles that could be have been inspired by the UK elgg project (www.elgg.org). As far as we know this is not the case, demonstrating that PLE principles do have a fertile ground out there. I am just wondering if it is the higher ed institutions that are going to roam about in that landscape...