Personal Learning Environments

The Wales-Wide Web | Personal Learning Environments

Some great quotes from this article.

... social software is based on the idea of 'small pieces, loosely connected' utilising commonly recognised standards and web services for linking ideas, knowledge and artefacts.

The promise of Personal Learning Environments could be to extend access to educational technology to everyone who wishes to organise their own learning. Furthermore the idea of the PLE purports to include and bring together all learning, including informal learning, workplace learning, learning from the home, learning driven by problem solving and learning motivated by personal interest as well as learning through engagement in formal educational programmes.

All educational software, implicitly or otherwise, either enhances or restrains certain pedagogic approaches to learning. There is no such thing as pedagogically neutral software. A Personal Learning Environment could allow a leaner to configure and develop a learning environment to suit and enable their own style of learning.

....the context in which learning takes place becomes the context in which the learning is to be applied and the nature of the learning interface - or the learning materials become the occupational tools with which the (work process) knowledge is carried out.