Time for our personal learning environments #PLENK2010

It’s that time of the year again I start asking myself whether to register for the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) “Connectivism and Connective Knowledge” again. I did so previous years, and even though I never managed to follow-up on the activities till the end, I always learned stuff and enjoyed the discussion with the other participants.

This year it seems the course is called Personal Learning Environments, Networks and Knowledge 2010. This course is a joint venture between the National Research Council of Canada (Institute for Information Technology, Learning and collaborative Technologies Group, PLE Project), The Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute at Athabasca University and the University of Prince Edward Island. Facilitators: George Siemens, TEKRI, Stephen Downes, NRC, Dave Cormier, UPEI, Rita Kop, NRC.

From the forums I quote this:

The idea behind the personal learning environment is that the management of learning migrates from the institution to the learner. The PLE connects to a number of remote services, some that specialise in learning and some that do not. Access to learning becomes access to the resources and services offered by these remote services. The PLE allows the learner not only to consume learning resources, but to produce them as well. Learning therefore evolves from being a transfer of content and knowledge to the
production of content and knowledge.” (Downes, 2007, 19)

In other words, what does it mean and how do we proceed when we use online networks, social bookmarks, collaborative video sharing and editing platforms, virtual environments, blogs and wikis (forgetting many other services and applications) in order to organize our own learning process?

The question interests me a lot. The previous years however I felt the course was very much a paradise for academics and teachers. Learning of course goes far beyond that, and my own interest is more how to organize self- and group-learning later in life, independently from the educational institutions.

Anyway, even though it is in a very classical classroom setting, I did like this video by Patricio Bustamante about personal learning environments (and of course academics and teachers never use full words but prefer talking about “PLE”):

Even though the course is about to enter the second week, there is still time to register. It is a connectivist type of (free!) course, based on aggregation, remixing, repurposing and feeding forward. It’s a bewildering experience but then again, you’re not supposed to learn and study all the stuff which is presented, it’s about using tools and creating collaboratively (I think).

There are quite a few Second Life residents active in the course, just do a “second life” search in the forums! Telmea Story launched a SL group PLENK2010.

This work by rolandlegrand is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International