April 05, 2006
Plex Personal Learning Environment
I've just spent 20 mins or so over lunch having a look at the Plex personal learning environment desktop client (written in Java, versions available for Windows, Linux and Mac), and whilst I'm still not sure about half of what it does (there's no documentation I'm aware of yet), here are a few screenshots:
The client itself offers an arrangement of resizeable, tabbed panels and the ability to define a set of personal profiles, presumably to allow you to have different personas/profiles for different courses you may be signed up for?
At the moment, chat/IM options are limited to AIM, MSN, Yahoo and Jabber. (How about Google Talk, chaps? And what about Skype...?)
Other profile options include lists of your goals, friends, portfolio, etc., as well as a 'sharing' setting, presumably referring to an online storage (ftp?) area?
Activities, Resources and People appear to be the major category types.
- Activities: I'm not sure I understand these yet...
- Resources: these can be orgainsed in gorups and added in various flavours; I'm guessing that the Smart Resources will support filtering options:
- People: a contacts book, I guess, default on three contact types:
Contacts are entered using FOAF records:
The idea then is that you can email or chat with contacts (although I'm not sure if these features are implemented yet):
Resources are easy enough to add, and for feeds include a feedreader:
The Tools look interesting:
Conduits and Providers both allow you to enter enter details for web service APIs; here, for example, is the Conduit setup panel:
and the Provider set up panel:
This integration of APIs means (somehow) that you can wire up the client to a variety of APIs and presumably pull content from them, as well as send content to them. I'm not sure if the Providers are intended as sources and the Conduits as sinks?
Certainly if the Providers are going to be things like search targets, it would be useful if OpenSearch was supported.
The ability to share resources seems to be built into the system by means of sharing via Conduits although as with almost everything else in the environment, I have yet to try it out...:
Tasks can be defined either as single entities, or via a feed:
Does this mean that Tasks also generate feeds I wonder?
The Exploration type looks interesting:
but I'm not sure what it does yet...
Well that's the quick tour - I'm not sure what most of the facilities let you do yet, but I'll try and have a tinker of thenext week or two, in which case I'll blog any findings...
PS there's a presentation about Plex from one of its developers here.
Posted by ajh59 at April 5, 2006 01:37 PM