Personal learning environment

Definition

Graham Attwell defines Personal Learning Environments (PLE)

Architecture =

Daniel K. Schneider believes that there is no such thing as 'the' personal environment. While an institution may indeed provide a central access point to loosely coupled services within a web services-based architecture like e-framework, parts of it always will be external services and tool, cool things that "pop up" and are useful just for a precise learner or maybe a teacher.

However a number of design criteria for these next generation learning environments can be formulated.

The Jafari model

Jafari et al (2006) identify:

(1) Lifelong. The learning process is fluid. Learners can move between schools and between jobs and within the job between doing and just-in-time open learning. Therefore a system should not be campus-based, “with the learner's e-portfolio being the foundation and the connecting point to the system. This new design model automatically creates an e-portfolio account for every learner, along with a personal URL or Web address, forming a lifelong learning repository, lifelong contact information, and a cyber-identity.” (Jafari, 2006).

(2) Outsourced to a organization that provides services to both learner (his whole life) and the school.

(3) Global. Break down walls, e.g. offer a FOAF-like Colleague of a colleague (COAC) service, e.g. let outsiders participate in educational activities.

(4) Comprehensive. “As illustrated in Figure 1 (below), the Jafari model also proposes a comprehensive, 'Swiss Army knife' toolbox - that is, all the necessary tools for day-to-day learning and teaching tasks. These include tools for L/CMSs, e-portfolios, social and professional networking, peer review, learning assessment, and object repositories, as well as various communication and collaboration tools. With this model, the L/CMS is only a subset and a component of the e-learning environment. This model emulates the successful Microsoft Office Suite by offering all the important tools a user needs. And if an advanced tool is not included, such as an implemented L/CMS system on campus, this model offers integration and connectivity. These functions can be obtained using existing integration practices such as Web services, API, and RSS.” (

File:Jafari-ple-model.png

Next-Generation E-Learning Environment

(5) Smart. Personal intelligent agent software forms a major component of the Jafari model. “The intelligent agent would have the capability to learn, to think, to reason, and to intelligently act and react on behalf of an individual learner. With this, the next generation of e-learning environment software becomes expert on an individual user, serving the user according to his or her personal requirements and desires”. Daniel K. Schneider is very skeptical about this. Intelligent agents were popular in the ITS literature and precisely failed because they take away control for the user. Agents that would just help sorting information (not serving information) is plenty enough.

Google

Internet Companies such as Google do see the potential of such models. E.g. as of April 2007, Google offers an increasing amout of on-line tools, most of which can be used in an educational setting.

• http://www.google.ch/intl/en/options/
• http://labs.google.com/

Google's Tools for your classroom page (Google for educators]) explitly mentions various specialized search tools such as Book Search, Earth, Maps, Personalized Homepage, Web Search and then points to applications like Blogger, Calendar, Docs & Spreadsheets, Picasa, SketchUp, Talk, Groups, News, Page Creator. Now using these tools in classroom doesn't make it a technically integrated environment. The question of who really needs something like an LMS for classroom teaching is another issue, but a future IT solution also of interest to higher education may be Google Apps Education Edition, an application that integrates some Google services. “Google Apps Education Edition is a broad IT solution that schools can use to bring communication and collaboration tools to the entire academic community for free. Google manages all the technology details, so you can focus your time, energy and budgets on teaching your kids.” [1], retrieved 16:40, 25 April 2007 (MEST). An other interesting bit is in the here.

There may be truth and a lot of future behind Powerful solutions. Zero investment. slogans. If you can have it for free and it works, why bother with administration that often makes life difficult for teachers and typical university portals that erase your data every few years or even after each terms? More importantly, several Google services can be integrated with existing IT systems through published extensibility APIs.

Discussion

Daniel K. Schneider doubts that any company will be able to "corner the market" for this, unless we will have standards to exchange all the personal incorporated data from one system to another. This will not be easy, since standards both empower and cripple creativity.

There may be competition/solutions from several sides:

• Existing "closed" portals like LMSs may increasingly open up to various web services
• New educational integrator systems like something based on Jafari's model (outsourcing the integrator and the data)
• Something in between like [e-Framework]
• Global service providers like Google (or MS) that provide virtual portals around their own services

Links

• Epsilen environment. A PLE environment prototype (Jafari).

References

• Attwell, Graham, Personal Learning Environments, Blog-Entry. HTML, retrieved 16:40, 25 April 2007 (MEST).

• Jafari, Ali; Patricia McGee, and Colleen Carmean (2006). Managing Courses, Defining Learning:

What Faculty, Students, and Administrators Want, EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 41, no. 4 (July/August 2006): 50-71. HTML.