Whenever I do a social bookmarking workshop, one of the first things I stress is the social bookmarking tools are - first and foremost - personally useful: they are provide an excellent way of managing your own link collections without being locked to your favourites/bookmark list on a particular browser on a particular computer (though if Zinkmo does what it says on the tin, cross-computer/cross-browser bookmark synching now seems to be available...).
They're also useful socially too, of course - pivot browsing by user or tag are great ways of discovering resources related to a particular topic, via a human filter.
That said, the social tool I find I'm using most at the moment on delicious is, actually, a person-to-person tool: link sharing with individuals using the for: tagging construct.
Which brings me to personal learning environments, once again via the Facebook Platform, (e.g. Facebook Platform or VLE - where would YOUR students prefer to be?; read more about the Facebook Platform here. TechCrunch also has an interesting take on it, comparing the browse model of resource discovery at Yahoo with the search model of Google and the 'social push' sharing model (over a social graph) of Facebook).
In particular, I think the Facebook Platform could be a great personal learning environment because it offers powerful social networking tools, as well as the recently announced possibilities for personal tool integration.
For social tools to succeed, they should also be personally useful. Maybe personal learning environment frameworks*, in turn, need to have rich social functionality to really take off? Which is exactly what Facebook offers.
For institutions, the knowledge that groups can be formed around a particular cohort are also important features - and again, Facebook can offer this sort of functionality.
For individual students, being able to form small working groups (tutor groups, for example) is potentially useful (and something that is observed in OU courses via online tutor group conferences/forums).
*Personal Learning Environment Frameworks: there's been a lot of talk that a "PLE is not a thing" (Stephen Downes has commented on this quite a bit too) and whilst I agree it's not a thing, I do think that there are containers - or frameworks - that allow a range of personal and social tools, as well as information feeds and storage, to be collected together in some way (via linking or embedding) to offer the user a single 'place to go' to access these tools; a (personal) learning workspace, if you like.
This workspace is personal because the user has some control over the high level navigation and layout of the workspace, as well as some control over the access permissions they can use to share their personal assets with others.
So if I talk of a PLE as a thing, I really mean enabling technologies that let me aggregate a range of tools into a space. And why would I want to do that? So institutional providers can give their students something - a place to go - when they arrive on day one that will provide them with access to tools and information services that they are likely to find useful over the course of their studies.
Being able to disaggregate the tool set, whether by dropping tools or continuing to use them out of the context of the environment (maybe when the student graduates, or in their personal life) are also important requirements.
Posted by ajh59 at June 1, 2007 11:01 AM