Our publication on “First steps towards an integration of a Personal Learning Environment at university level” for this year ICT 2011 conference is now online available as draft version. The slides have been already published here.
Abstract:
Personalization is seen as the key approach to handle the plethora of information in today’s knowledge-based society. It is expected that personalized teaching and learning will efficiently address learner needs. The education of the future will change as a result of the influence of Web 2.0 content typified by a steadily increasing supply of data. This means that the students of tomorrow will regularly have to deal with sharing and merging content from different sources. Therefore, mashup technology will become a very important lens by which to focus on individual learning needs and enable personalized access to particular information. The following paper describes the challenges of Personal Learning Environments at higher education institutions. In the first section, the concept of Personal Learning Environments is presented, while the second section discusses the new challenges that arise for learning with the help of Personal Learning Environments. The third section describes the technical background of Personal Learning Environments and the widget standard in general. In section four, a first prototype of a personal learning environment will be presented, which is integrated into the learning culture at the Technical University of Graz. A detailed description of the available widgets for the prototype, along with a first expert evaluation, is provided. Finally, the conclusion of the article consolidates the main points of the paper and present plans for future research together with the prospective developments.
First steps towards an integrated Personal Learning Environment at the university level
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Reference: Ebner, M., Schön, S., Taraghi, B., Drachsler, H., Tsang, P. (2011). First steps towards an integration of a Personal Learning Environment at university level. R. Kwan et al. (Eds.): ICT 2011, CCIS 177, pp. 22–36, 2011, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011
I really cannot share this perspective of what a PLE is. Viewing it as synonym of “mashup”, a kind of dashboard that aggregates content from several sources, is missing the point, imo. Publishing a post on your blog, updating your Twitter status, bookmarking a web page on Delicious, just to give some examples, would be actions “outside” your PLE. How can that make sense? What about filtering being done for the user to prevent information overload in this “PLE”?
Not that the project isn’t great and very useful, but this “mashup” would be only an element in a person’s PLE. Like other solutions, such as Netvibes or iGoogle, it’s a place where you can aggregate content, resources, etc. and do some things (in this case, very useful ones, like connecting to the university services), but not the whole of what a PLE is.
So, my quirk with this kind of approach is the same I have with most “institutionally supported PLEs” – it’s not about their importance, their quality, their usefulness or their innovative approach (many of these projects are very good on all counts), it’s about calling them PLEs.
If it’s not a duck, why call it a duck?
(Comment posted on Google+ – https://plus.google.com/102451089525071544188/posts/TETt9Kd6GmY)
sorry that I definetly did not agree – in no terms – you are takinf of personal learning ENVIRONMENT, so there is indeed a technical envrionment
first of all, if you are saving somehing on delicious – what have you learned? storing bookmarks? fine, if you like to learn storing bookmarks it’s seems to be ok
futhermore if we are taking of formal institutions, we need an environment that adresses more than just blogging and safing bookmarks – this environment is just a first attempt to bring this worlds toegether, it’s to enhance current systems by allowing access to other tools, to combine it
the goal is that teachers of tomorrow provide students a vision as well as a structure which tools and which content will be useful for their learning process on a particular content – or I simply ask you, do you believe that learning math make sense on Twitter, ask somenone there if it an algorithm can be explainend in just 140 signs … so what we need are learning objects, learning content as well as online application got be toegehter to enhance the traditional (and sometimes also useful) university with new applications …