February 22, 2006

What Is a PLE?

I just stumbled across this piece on a Personal Learning Environment Model (via Downes), which comments:

I'm not even sure that it [i.e. a PLE] can be created or designed by someone for someone else. Just as each person's desires, abilities and past experiences are different, each person's personal learning environment should be their own unique combination of tools, networks and methods that help them accomplish their goals. If the learning environment is truly personal, the tools and the learning are self-directed by definition.
and thought I'd use it to post a note-to-self that I really need to write a bit more about portability in the sense of portability of personally generated content and information (e.g. from blogs, e-portfolios, social/online bookmarking systems etc.) as well as portable apps and PPLEs) and the extent to which a PLE is actually a personal mashup rather a one-size-fits-all hosted offering.

I'm going to start looking at how something like what Ning might become could play a role in this - i.e. as an environment where users can mix-and-match apps and interoperability is supported by lightweight XML based protocols.

I also wonder whether PLE recipe books could show different configurations of web 2.0 apps, some well known, some possibly not so popular, to demonstrate several starting point PLE conficgurations.

This also resonates, for me at least, with something else I picked up from Downes, today, who in commenting on As We May Interact?, asks:

But I still think we need to explore and understand better the nature of distributed applications. Tools like Flickr, Friendster and Technorati each try to become, if you will, a destination for people, to aggregate as many users as they can. We need to focus less on these big centres and more on how even unpopular tools can be mashed up and aggregated. There needs to be, if you will, a long tail of Web 2.0 tools - but nobody knows how to do that yet.
A PLE configuration masher, (perhaps with interaction design inspired by Extratasty!), should certainly be able to pick up on some of these long tail apps and add them to any PLE mix, if required...

Hmm - I wonder - are we talking here about VPLEs (virtual PLEs) and is there scope for a VVLE (V2LE) - virtual VLE - that exists only as a mashup configuration, perhaps with an umbrella front end and uniform styling?

Posted by ajh59 at February 22, 2006 01:49 PM
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