I am working on a couple of new papers on Personal Learning Environments. And getting asked by developers what we want them to produce as a PLE. Nota n easy question – in fact I am not sure it is the right question! But here are a few things I think I want my PLE to be able to do.

Access / search

One of the major things we use computers for learning for is accessing and searching information and knowledge. Whilst Google has greatly improved searching it is far form perfect. We need to be able to search inside documents in a way we cannot at the moment. And of course we need to be able to access and search our own computers and possibly those of our peer network. We need to be able to search inside audio and video, which is as yet problematic. And perhaps most importantly we need to be able to find people. Accessing and searching poses many challenges for developers. At present at a relatively simple level of educational repositories we are uncertain as to whether federated search or harvesting offers the best approach.
Aggregate and scaffold
A second use of a Personal Learning Environment could be for aggregating the outcomes of our activity – be it searches for documents, or other media, be it people or be it our own work. Aggregation is more than simply producing a database or of ‘learning objects’. Aggregation should allow us to bring information and knowledge together in a meaningful way. At the same time such a process of aggregation should assist us in scaffolding our knowledge, both in terms of growing on existing knowledge but also in terms of compromising what we know to accommodate the new.

Manipulate
Another possible use of a Personal Learning Environment is to manipulate or rearrange knowledge artefacts. This could be at the simple level of editing text or adding a note or tag. However with the use of different forms of media it may involve more extensive repurposing of such objects. Such repurposing may be for use within a personal knowledge base or may be for (re) publishing or sharing with others.

Another reason for manipulating media artefacts may be to render them usable within different environments and contexts.
Analyse
A PLE should be a place to analyse knowledge. This might involve the use of different tools. Alternatively, or additionally, it might involve the functionality to render information, knowledge and data in forms to allow analysis. It might also include the functionality to share and collaborate in analyses and to compare the results of such analysis with the research of others.
Store
A simple and obvious function for a PLE is to store data and artefacts. However, that storage function may not be so easy as at first thought with an increasing use of different storage media including external drives and web storage. Whilst some data and artefacts may be stored in a personal repository it may be that others will be stored within shared areas.
Reflect
Reflection is a central activity in developing learning. Reflection is particularly critical in an information rich (or information overload) environment. Reflection involves questioning, challenging and seeking clarification and forming and defending opinions and supporting or challenging the opinions of others. A PLE could provide (micro) tools for supporting these processes.
Present
We all have a need to present our ideas, learning and knowledge in different ways and for different purposes. It may be that we merely wish to present some work in progress for feedback from others. We may also wish to present parts of our work for a seminar or for a job application. A PLE could offer the functionality to select and summarise ideas and learning and develop a presentation in different formats according to need. Some forms of presentation may be unique instances – for example a presentation at a conference, others may be more recursive e.g a C.V. Tool also need to take into account that presentation may involve different media.
Represent
The representation of learning and knowledge within a PLE may be seen as a more complex functionality of presentation. Whilst a presentation will draw directly on artefacts within the PLE, a representation will attempt to show the underpinning knowledge structures of such artefacts. A PLE could include tools for visualisation and tools which allow the structures of the knowledge to be shown in a dynamic way. They might also allow the dynamic re-rendering of such structures either through the interrelationship of the artefacts and the underpinning knowledge structures.   The representation of knowledge might be an individual activity but might also form part of a wider community activity

Share

That a personal Learning Environment should support individuals in sharing their learning and knowledge almost goes without saying. However, what is shared, when and with whom is far more complex. Tools could be developed, for example, which allow sharing to be the property of any particular artefact. A PLE might also include tools to facilitate collaborative work and collaborative work flows.
Network and people
Networks lie at the heart of a Personal Learning Environment. A PLE might be defined at a personal or individual node in a networked collaborative learning environment. It must be emphasised that a PE is not a document management system (although of course documents may be part of a PLE). PLE tools might allow social representation of networks and networking interchange. Such tools might also allow social association between people, knowledge and artefacts.

I,m working on a new paper on PLEs. I’m finding the idea of Rhizomatic learning extremely useful. Here is an extract from the paper.

‘Technologies are changing fast and our use of technologies is changing faster. In looking to the future it may be worth returning ot the them of rhizomatic learning (Cormier, 2008). Dave Cormier says the rhizome is a botanical metaphor. “A rhizomatic plant has no center and no defined boundary; rather, it is made up of a number of semi-independent nodes, each of which is capable of growing and spreading on its own, bounded only by the limits of its habitat. In the rhizomatic view, knowledge can only be negotiated, and the contextual, collaborative learning experience shared by constructivist and connectivist pedagogies is a social as well as a personal knowledge-creation process with mutable goals and constantly negotiated premises.”
Such social processes in the use of technology for learning and knowledge creation have been seen in a conference and a summer school which I have recently attended. In both, we created a tweme for the event, a mash up of delicious, twitter and flickr based on a common tab. In neither case did we pre-announce the use of the tweme, neither was the use of the particular technology officially prescribed nor indeed endorsed by the event organizers. However the use of the tweme for knowledge sharing was adopted organically by participants and became the main means of ICT based communication and sharing. In one case the conference organizers had established their own NetVibes site for the mash up of blogs; however by the second day they recognized what was happening and emailed participants to inform them that the tweme was “ the main channel for information” going on to say “Please have a look on it because the freshest and the hottest information can be found only from there.”

One interesting effect of the use of twitter and twemes was to facilitate the unplanned participation of researchers and practitioners from all over the world in the vents and a consequent wider and open dialogue than the original programme and curriculum design had envisaged. The curriculum was being increasingly developed by the community and the community extended to include participants who were not present face to face.

The technological development facilitating such change was the availability of connectivity and the use of different devices. In fact at the first conference connectivity was problematic. The wireless network became overloaded. Nevertheless, participants found ways of communicating, using other mobile phones or a skype to twitter interface which required less bandwidth than a browser. Those with access to neither simply recorded their observations and rushed off to find better bandwidth in the coffee break.

The agenda and curricula of the vents became extended through participants negotiating topics they wished to explore through the ongoing discourse and organising ‘unconferencing’ events outside the main programme.

Such experiences may point the way to how personal learning environments will evolve in the future. The PLE will not be one application running on the desktop or in a web browser. Rather, it will be multiple applications running on may different devices. It is also important to understand that learners will use different devices in different contexts and for different purposes. The PLE will be based on networks of people with whom learners interact, they may adapt a particular tool for communication and interaction in a particular context but then cease to sue that tool when that context has passed. In previous projects linked to mobile learning we have tended to focus on how to transmit standardised learning materials and applications to different platforms and devices.

The PLE will be comprised of not only all the software tools, applications and services we use for learning but the different devices we use to communicate and share knowledge.

This if knowledge seen as resting in connections and learning bases on those connections then PLE may be sum of devices plus use of those devices for learning. Another way to view the PLE is to see it as the summation of connections we make in a nodal learning network. This includes, of course, face-to-face interactions both in terms of participation in learning programmes and events but also one to one and informal interactions and an ongoing process of reflection and sense making of such interactions. Learning and learning environments become synonymous with the identity of the leaner, both the self perceived identity and the learner as others perceive them.

I am in Ohrid in Macedonia for the European Summer School on Technology Enhanced Learning & Knowledge Management 2008. As ever it is a pleasure to meet colleagues from all over Europe, and particularly from Eastern Europe. And the school is alo interesting in that it brings together researchers from a series of large scale European funded research projects. What are the themes of the school. It is a bit difficult to say at the moment.

One issue that a number of projects seem to be wrestling with is how to represent knowledge. There is the by now familiar debate about taxonomies, ontologies and tagging. I have a concern as to how much useful software is being created. To soem extent this is a tension within research projects which are both attempting to undertake fundamental research and at the same time involve users.

Anyway, as in Salzburg Cristina and I have created a tweme (a mash up of twitter, delicious and flickr) for the summer school. You can follow our tweme here. Feel free to participate. The tag is #scohrid.

Lots of fun at the Edumedia conference in Salzburg. Somehow managed to speak at the same session as Jay Cross. With the two of us on the attack I think some participants thought they had strayed into a meeting of dangerous revolutionaries.

And I just about managed to get something going with twemes. Twemes is an aggregator of twitter, delicious and flickr working on a unique tag. The tag for the conference is #edumedia08. OK there was not enough bandwidth for accessing the web and both my phone and camera ran out of power.

But I could connect to skype and the ever knowledgeable Cristina Costa told me of a skype-twitter interface and it worked. Some eight of us at the conference have been using the tag. You can follow the tweme at http://twemes.com/edumedia08. I must say I like the mix of languages.

On the train this morning I read ta new paper by Dave Cormier entitled “Rhizomatic Education: Community as Curriculum (note – free access but you will have to create an account). thsi is a great article and I will return to some of the ideas Dave raises later this week. But I like very much the idea of community as curriculum. Dave says

“In the rhizomatic model of learning, curriculum is not driven by predefined inputs from experts; it is constructed and negotiated in real time by the contributions of those engaged in the learning process. This community acts as the curriculum, spontaneously shaping, constructing, and reconstructing itself and the subject of its learning..”

And that is what I am trying to do in Salzburg.

Or PLEs, Mupples and PLSs. Its a bit of a mouthful. A couple of weeks ago the iCamp project came up with the idea of Mupples – Mashup Personal Learning Environments. “Mash-ups, the ‘frankensteining’ of software artefacts and data”, they say “have enabled a new generation of learning tools. Web-applications, services, and data can now be endlessly recombined, no matter where they reside.” I think this is a helpful idea. And they are organising a conference on it in September.

Now this morning comes the idea of Personalised Learning Systems. The term is used in a blog post by Ken Carroll from Praxis Language based in Shanghai. I met Hank Horkoff, the CEO, last week and was mightily impressed with the work they are doing (watch this spot for a Sounds of the Bazaar interview with Hank).

Anyway, Ken says:

“The PLS has one obsessive objective: to allow the user in every way possible to fit the learning around her own needs (rather than forcing her to conform to some outside requirements). In this sense, the PLS is consistent with Personal Learning Environments, and of course, with our own philosophy of learning on your terms. The lifelong learner simply has to have ownership/control of the learning. Perhaps the PLS would fit as a language learning toolkit within a PLE to enable that control.”

I am not so sure I like the term Personalised Learning System. But the idea makes a lot of sense in terms of using standards compliant and web 2 savvy learning provision which learners can access though the (mashup) Personal Learning Environment.

I am working with Jenny Hughes on some research for the Mature project. And in the course of developing a few research proposals Jenny asked me what Layered learning is. I had to admit I didn’t know. So it was off to Google. And up came an abstract of a paper by Kumar, Torr and Zisserman which contained the wonderful phrase “efficent, loopy belief propagation.” Wow!. I wish I had written that.

Layered learning seem to have been developed by researchers working to program robots to play football. And basically it refers to breaking down skills and knowledge into a series of hierarchically defined layers. So you might teach a robot to kick the ball and to run. And you might teach them to watch what the other team is doing and to be aware of where their own team robots are and so on. And at the end of the the day you synthesis the different layers of learning to develop a football playing robot. Jenny questions whether people learn in this way. Of course sometimes we do synthesize chunks of learning to carry out a task. But just as often we may analyse a whole chunk of learning to derive the different skills and knowledge from it. In that way we can distinguish analytic learning from synthetic learning. And layered learning appears to focus solely on the synthetic learning process.

Be glad to hear from anyone who knows more than me about this.

This is a question which has bothered me for some time as I am involved in developmental projects for both e-Portfolios and Personal Learning Environments. And it could well be that there is little difference, depending on how both applications (or better put, learnng processes) are defined. Of course, if e-Portfolios are seen primarily as a vehicle for assessment then the differences are clear. Simililarly if the e-Portfolio is owned by an institution or course. But if the e-Portfolio is seen as being owned by the learner, is intended to record all learning and is seen as a tool for formative self evaluation and for reflection then the differnces become more fuzzy.

I have had a number of interesting discussions about this issue recently – with Jenny Hughes, Cristina Costa and Mark van Harmelen. Jenny (who loves working with words) talked about the difference between presenting knowledge and representing knowledge. I think this is a valuable distinction. An e-Portfolo is a` place for reflection, for  recognising learning and presneting that learning. A PLE may be seen as a tool (or set of tools) for not only presenting learning  but for also (individually or collectively) developing a representation of wider knowledge sets (ontologies?).

Of course it could be possible to develop a tool set which supports both tasks. But there are different sets of tools involved in those different prcesses and in the interests of si8mplicity and usability it may be better to develop environments which allow flexible access to such different tools or tool sets for different purposes.

Why am i wrestling with such obscure ideas? Pontydysgu is a partner in the EU funded Mature project. Part of our tasks is to research the ‘state of the art’ on these issues and to develop and test PLEs as a process for developing and sharing knowledge. Its going to be interesting.

I am not particularly good at ‘live’ blogging. But I thought I would practice with a couple of posts from my travels this week. At the moment I am in Karlsruhe in the South of Germany at the kickoff meeting of the EC mature project.

Most of today has been taken up with partner presentations but the last horu has been more interesting. There are a lot of talents between the partners and a reasonable repositopry of tools and applications that the different techncial developesr have brought to the table.

On the one hand it would appear useful to develop mock ups of the different tools – or at leasts some mash up some of the outputs an services. But on the other hand we need to take the learners into account – and our aim of user based knowledge aggregation – not just aggregate technology and tools. Bringing those processes together is not so easy. Can we really work out use cases before users have accessed and tested the tools? More tomorrow.

I’m back on the road this week.

Tomorrow I head off to Karlsruhe for the launch of a new research project called Mature. “MATURE conceives individual learning processes to be interlinked (the output of a learning process is input to others) in a knowledge-maturing process in which knowledge changes in nature. This knowledge can take the form of classical content in varying degrees of maturity, but also involves tasks & processes or semantic structures. The goal of MATURE is to understand this maturing process better, based on empirical studies, and to build tools and services to reduce maturing barriers.”

I will be working on how Perosnal Learning Environments can be used as part of the knowledge maturing process. Could be a lot of fun.

And on Friday I head off to Pesero in Italy. On Saturday I will be running a workshop on social software, PLEs and e-Portfolios. The workshop is the last day of a five day course on Open and Distance Learning. There are five tutors on the course. We had a skype meeting to discuss what platforms we would use and as might be expected we all had different ideas. The first two days of the course are to be run using Dokeos. I had a try at setting up materials in this system. There is nothing wrong with Dokeos. I is a perfectly respectable Open Source Learning management System. But I just can’t get along with such systems. I guess I just find it too difficult to think in LMS structures. So, along with Cristina Costa, who is also teaching on the course, I set up a PBwiki, I was much happer with this. It is quick and flexible. And Cristina has extended it to include several Pageflakes mash-up pages.

I like this and will use the wiki for support material for presentations and workshops in the future. I will also use the wiki as part of the workshop for recording processes and outcomes. Everything is licensed under Creative Commons. So, if you want to reuse materials please feel free.

I guess I won’t have so much time for blogging this week. But I will try to post a couple of progress reports from the road.

I’m doing a presentation on Tuesday on Learning and Knowledge Maturing. It is a bit of a mash up – some older slides from me plus some slides from Steven Downes. And it comes with full audio – I used slidecast for the first time. So trun up your speakers and press the green button (warning – about 20 minutes long). A longer post about making this will follow.

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