PLE
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My personal work/leisure/learning environment
Following on from the previous post I was thinking about how I have accrued a set of technologies around me. This wasn’t a deliberate policy – I didn’t think "I need to construct a personal working environment. Here are the functions I need…" Rather I have come across them, experimented with some, rejected some and kept others. It was only when considering what tools I couldn’t afford to lose that I realised I had ‘constructed’ something that might loosely be termed a working environment. I’ve mapped it out in Compendium, and here is the image (click on it to open up in a new window): I suspect my set of…
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PLEs and the institution
Following on from all our VLE discussion, this post from Scott Wilson caught my eye. He has another good diagram (I’ve borrowed his Future VLE one before – with acknowledgement Scott!). I have had my reservations about PLEs, and particularly how they interface with the institution. I like the idea of assembling your tools over time, but there are some real issues about how these interact with institutional systems (authentication in particular – are you a student on this course, what support do you have, how do we verify course records, etc). Scott goes some way to addressing these. I think a telling quote is: Originally I thought that a…
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Stringle implications
The last in this trilogy of posts… Several things occurred to me when playing with Stringle yesterday. I’ll try to elucidate them here: Course design – increasingly I feel that writing course resources is a redundant activity. I think course design will move towards creating activities around as yet unknown content. For instance, we added in a feed for any content that is tagged elearning and evolution. Now it’s a reasonable bet that this will contain some decent (and not so decent material). But it helps future-proof the course. I don’t think you could quite rely on such resources but the ratio of educator derived material to external resources is…
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Stringle 2.0
Having shown you Stringle, I thought it’d be interesting to think what else it would need to be a usable tool. Here’s my thoughts: Tools – A good range of tools that users can select from. Tony’s working on this, so you should have a range to select from and can simply drag them into your toolset and give them a label (thus avoiding all that del.icio.us and URL stuff). Easy way of adding new tool – if you come across a tool then you want to be able to add it simply by clicking a button. If we were providing students with a university social bookmarking tool, then this…
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Stringle – almost a web 2.0 PLE?
Tony Hirst visited me yesterday in Cardiff and we spent the day going through his String n Glue VLE (Stringle). I’ll split up my posts on this, so in this one I’ll do a quick users guide, then I’ll look at what else it needs in another post, and finally some thoughts. Before we get stuck in I ought to just say that there is a bit of clunkiness about this, and the immediate reaction might be ‘most students are not going to do this.’ Which is true, but a lot of this clunkiness could be removed with a bit of resource and programming (e.g. creating a button that automatically…
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Outsourcing learning technologies
This article in the Economist Consumer technologies are invading corporate computing (via George Siemens) outlines how some universities are effectively outsourcing a lot of technical development, using the Google Apps for your domain bundle. The guy says that "Compared with the staid corporate-software industry, using these services is like “receiving technology from an advanced civilisation”, says Mr Sannier." A couple of things on this – firstly there is often a delay between the rhetoric and the reality when new ideas come along. The whole service oriented approach was one of these. I found myself wisely telling everyone to think of everything as a service, without really being sure what this…
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Stephen Downes’ visit
Stephen Downes came to the OU today and gave a talk on PLEs. We had a chance to chat beforehand, and his talk was, as ever interesting and thought provoking. I felt that his vision of a PLE, although it steered clear of the client based talk I have seen in other ones, was very much based around an individual and their collection of resources. I didn’t see much room for collaboration in it. I queried him on this and he responded that the resources should include community and peer resources and tools such as Skype would be included. I can see how this would be neat (and as I…
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Institution vs individual environments
Have just completed writing for a course on eportfolios. I remain a bit sceptical on these, at times they seem little more than a set of prepared fields for web publishing. In terms of academic practice they can be seen as part of a general shift from the institution to the individual. Along with blogs, social bookmarks, individual portals, etc the emphasis is less on providing students with all their ICT requirements and rather on incorporating their existing tool set into the institution. This viewpoint sees its apotheosis with the Personal Learning Environment (CETIS PLE Project). Now if I had doubts about eportfolios, they are nothing compared to the ones…
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Clients are the new flares
I spent some time in a session on Personal Learning Environments recently. The issue of PLEs aside, what intrigued me was that most of the talk focused on the development of rich, desktop clients. In fashion they say if you stay still long enough, trends will come back around to where you are. This is true with educational trends also I guess, so for some it seems that clients, like flares, have come around again. Some of you will remember the early e-learning days where you had a plethora of different clients for each functions – email, discussion forums, online simulations, etc. Then the web came along and the web…
