the personal learning environments blog

I think what we are starting to see emerging is the sheer practicality of the PLE as both an individual and organisational response to the challenges and opportunities of networked learning. While some concentrate on the key empowering aspects and learner perspective, there is also a complementary organisational perspective, which sees the PLE as a key opportunity to gain the benefits of e-learning in the organisation without the substantial capital cost and management overhead of centralised learning provision.

The next stage is where we start to see the services that provide the complementary coordination for PLE-enabled learners operating in organisations. This month I posted on the CircleUp message coordination service, for example. I think we'll see more of these kinds of services emerge to support the type of coordination needed to support course groups and work teams but operating in a very different way to traditional groupware and VLE/LMS solutions.

In my own view, the PLE is different for each individual, but can make use of common tools and conventions. One of the aspects of PLE that hasn't been elaborated on much is the establishment of conventions - as it is these that make 'interoperability' even worth considering. For example, it is the conventions of 'blogging' (the process) that makes the interoperability of blog content via Atom and RSS meaningful.

The scope and nature of the interoperability we can provide to connect different PLEs is in one sense determined by the conventions that emerge in the practices of personal learning. (In another sense we make new practices and conventions possible by offering new tools and interoperability features)

What has been emerging in the past year or so has been more about conventions than technology as such - the educational use of blogs, use of bookmarks, and use of tagging and filtering. These conventions are emerging from the use made of the technologies by pioneering teachers and learners.

What are far less developed are the conventions of association and rendezvous - the conventions and patterns for coordinated activity such as community-forming and collaborative work using distributed technologies. Distributed identity (e.g. OpenID) provides one of the important building blocks for the technology base that would allow such conventions to emerge, but there is a lot more work to do.

There is a commentary on this by George Siemens, however I'd like to add a comment of my own regarding reversal; perhaps a simple way of expressing reversal is to say that a PLE, when pushed beyond its limits becomes impersonal. (For example, this would be like the mandating of ePortfolios that turns them from personal into institutional artifacts.)

However, I'm not sure the tetrad is the right way to look at the PLE, but a way of looking at media that might be incorporated within an individuals' PLE, or perhaps a mechanism that a PLE might employ as a tool for helping its owner understand media.

It reminds me of Katharine Harmon's book You Are Here with its maps of personal geographies.

Ray has blogged more recently about the need to separate out the learning aspects of the PLE from aspects of 'doing'. This fits with a model of PLE as being more closely aligned with strategic rather than operational activity, with a different scope.

The latest news on the next milestone of Flock is the addition of a people view. In Plex we effectively had a completely different UI perspective for working with people as opposed to working with content-type resources. It'll be interesting to see how Flock tackle the HCI issues, not to mention the question of how to relate identities to people.

and ... will it support FOAF?

In this Flickr photoset (or use this tag instead) I've compared some of the ways Flock and Plex handle the management of web services using a very similar model. (I've written comments on each screenshot)

Not all patterns are implemented in both applications: for example, Plex has no notion of notifications (nor a photo manager), while Flock has no concept of rating resources. However, its easy I think to see how these could operate in both applications.

Flock has done an excellent job in some places of "hiding the plumbing", whereas Plex has been keeping everything more or less exposed (its not, after all, really intended to be a tool for typical users, but a testbed and demonstrator for people interested in this topic). In particular they've done well at implementing service discovery - something we knew was an obstacle to users was locating API endpoints and Flock has made a decent stab at this, whereas Plex's "exposed wiring" approach requires a fair knowledge of where to locate things like service.post REL tags, for example.

I think the separation of "bookmarks" and "blog posts" as distinct types of resource has pragmatic value at the UI level, although within the prototype development work it became very clear very quickly that at a deeper level there is no real distinction. Perhaps under the chrome, Flock does the same?

Of course where Flock is currently lacking is the other kinds of instruments relating to people and activity (community?) - essentially Flock mostly contains the capabilities found in the "resources" perspective of Plex. However, I think it would be interesting to see if and how these other dimensions fit into the application as it progresses.

For more information on Flock, visit http://www.flock.com.

Mike has blogged his learning journey with his PLE here.

Mike's blog entry made me smile, but I think the point is well made - it really is about personal technology for personal learning, right?

As Scott mentioned in an email to me earlier, one option for the PLE is to enhance the browser into a complete personal learning toolkit using plugins and other technologies such as Mozilla's XUL. Something we've seen recently with Flock.