Time is marching on. TMA03 has been submitted, so there is only 1 TMA to go before the BIG final assignment.
It has been a while since I blogged here about H800, and by the looks of it, I'm not the only one that has been too busy elsewhere to post.
One of the activities this week is as follows:
Write a blog post on personal learning environments and where you think they are heading. Incorporate a representation of your own PLE.
How do the various arguments align with your own experience?
Are you broadly in favour of PLEs/use of Web 2.0 in an educational context?
Or do you foresee a number of issues and problems?
Some big questions in there, and I only intend to jot down my initial thoughts here so that others can see them and comment.
I like the idea of a learning environment being personal. I think that if you invest time in developing your own PLE, to suit your own needs, then you are more likely to engage and maintain it. The difficulty, of course, is that if everyone has their own completely unique PLE, it becomes an administration nightmare to deal with things like distribution and collection of information, especially where the collected information may be in the form of items that need to be assessed. So, the big question here is: should administration "nightmares" influence academic best-practice?
Web 2.0, and the personal interactions that come with it, definitely should (and in many ways do) form a part of ones learning environment. In my experience, using Web 2.0 tools such as Blogger and Twitter has allowed me to share ideas online, collaborate on projects, and learn from others all over the world in a way that pre-Web 2.0 technology just would not have worked (or at least, would not have worked anywhere near as efficiently as Web 2.0 tools....carrier pigeon, anyone???). All this, at a time when I am still tethered to Moodle in my capacity as both teacher and learner.
I think that a combination of personally chosen learning environments linked somehow to a centrally maintained system for administration, let's call it a hybrid-approach, may be the best way to operate a PLE at the moment.
As I wrote at the start, these are just some of my initial thoughts, which will be fleshed out with time, collaboration, and reflection.
Hi Wayne, I quite agree with you with the points. I feel that the more I design my own PLE, the more I get engaged. Your second point (a hybrid approach) is quite the same as we apply at our institution: We use an institutionally supported VLE, the role of which is to gather all student contributions that are going to be assessed in one way or another. Otherwise students are encouraged to use social media and tools for learning and collaborating. We are not very far with this approach yet, but on the way.
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