Hi,

let me reflect on our workshop on personal learning environments today, Wednesday, June the 18th.

Sitting together with about 10 participants we talked about several issues of PLEs. The workshop was divided into several parts and we started with getting a concrete feeling what a PLE actually is. So, each of us was drawing his own PLE. I tried to take pictures of them which you can find www.flickr.com/search/. Hope you can catch it! And for the first it was really interesting to see, that most of us had the same approaches and ideas of their PLEs. For almost all of us it is definitely more than the pieces of software on our computers rather than physically done work or available mediums like books, face-2-face meetings and so on. But thinking on the technology aspects of a PLE one crucial aspect made me contemplative: Making failures, learning by „try & error“, making experiences and learning by observation is part of our learning! But how could this part of the technical enhanced part of a PLE including the possibility to reflect it? I don‘t know, yet, but if anyone has an answer,  send me an e-mail to tobin@upb.de! 

Another interesting point was the understanding of learning with a PLE. Learning is supported by our PLEs, it is not done by it; if you know what I mean ;-). Furthermore the contextualization is a key aspect of our PLEs, as our way of learning changes with the context we are in and so the actual interesting part of our PLE changes. We change our roles, our medium and the people we talk with. When thinking on TEL this is a hard challenge which needs some research. So the request for learning on demand and communication on demand has to be supported by the technical part of a PLE. But in order to argue that learning is supported by our PLE, i think, we „only“ have to distinguish information retrieval and learning. 

After talking about our visualisations of PLEs, all of us tried to find a Twitter-nition of what is a PLE. Try to define ‚PLE‘ in 140 characters or less! That was very interesting because all of us described it and were aware that it is their own definition so that no one said „PLE is defined as ... at all“. Lot of them were published at twitter with the #scohrid tag and here they are listed; sorry, I can‘t remember all names :-( please add, if you found yours!

Cristina Costa:

myPLE is made up of diff aspects that help me make sense of what I need 2 learn 2 achieve my objectives.who/how are also included

Wolfgang Reinhardt:

a technical "eierlegende wollmilchsau" supporting me with contextualized information and access to tools i learn with

alev_elci: windrose emotional enthusiastic f-2-f collaborative experiential state of art technology discussions cooperative life-long-learn

doremido:

for me, it is a situation in which I'm that encourages me to reflect on my way to be or to know or to do 

France:

sth that i'm/was not aware of, sth that forces me 2 reflect on my learning processes, sth deserving a better design

Tanja: life, every place I am, I was, and I will be, listening, observing, talking, interacting with people and myself

Asarirete:

PLE for me will depend on the situations I am in, where, why , what I am learning

Thomas Hainey:

A closed formal/informal system subjectively and incrementally representing interests for optimal individual learning.

Ashley Healy:

4 me PLE is the facilitation of learning opportunities the how, where + what I learn. Also, ...

Simone:

Social Networks, Situation-aware, Social Software, Always there, Proactive Support, Integration of different knowledge Bases, communication.

Graham:

Please add yours!

Me:

The PLE-Devil is a concept of an environment for individually always changing learning processes embedded in social networks.

Reflecting the learning process we came to some points which are necessary for a PLE (Graham, partially I couldn't read your hand):

• it should integrate existing tools for working and learning processes
• it should expand on desktop metaphor bookshelf (share)
• it should present me (business card)
• visualisation
• search (people)
• easy & relaxed

In the end we splitted into groups of four persons to write a short storyboard on „In the year 2020: What I learned today...“ which ended in a podcast we recorded. This was very interesting and amusing and can be heard <Graham, Cristina, would add the link, please?>. Would be happy, if someone could add his own thoughts about this session!

In the end, I think several aspects came out: One point was awareness of what a PLE can be, what learning in our personal PLE can be and in some way what is needed to support it by technology. The atmosphere of the workshop was very informal and so it was easy to discuss and express our thoughts and develop ideas. As participant of the Mature project (and computer scientist ;-)), it would be interesting to see, what would be the outcome, if all of us had specified software services for the virtual part of the PLE.

So far,

Tobias.