Blog 4 Week 5 Taks 1

Anatomy of PLE (by Steve Wheeler from
http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/
2010/07/anatomy-of-ple.html)

A summary of what a PLN & PLE

Personal Learning Environment

Personal Learning Environment (PLE) from the name itself is an environment where an individual learns.  PLE has other components such as Personal Learning Network (PLN), Personal Web Tools (PWT), and Cloud Learning Environment (CLE). PLE can be digital or non-digital materials.  For non-digital materials, it could be newspapers, magazines, realia (field trips, immersions, encounters, visits, real experiences and conversations.

 (see PLE figure)

Personal Learning Network (PLN) this is the part of one’s learning environment wherein it focuses not only on the contents that we learn formally and informally but as well as the people around us that helps us learn and understand any subject matter .

Physiology of PLE (by Steve Wheeler from
http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com
/2010/07/physiology-of-ple.html)

Physiology of PLE (by Steve Wheeler from
http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com
/2010/07/physiology-of-ple.html)

 Personal Web Tools (PWT) these are the tools that learner uses. All of ensures that it will be unique to that individual learner.   Under digital materials, we can use Web 2.0 tools (Cloud Learning Environment). 

These tools can allow you to generate, organize, and share content with the use of communication. (see PWTfigure)

Anatomy of PLE (by Steve Wheeler from
http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com
/2010/07/anatomy-of-ple.html)

Cloud Learning Environment (CLE) as clouds are seen as one big autonomous system not owned by any educational institution. Users of some cloud-based services equally share the privileges like control, choice, sharing of content etc on these services.

CLE helps the learner access online free tool most of have open architecture, easier to use and free but unprotected and vulnerable.

As PLE is the combination of tools and it is owned by the students wherein they enjoy full control on and choice of.  The tools within a PLE are most likely not used for the purpose of formal education of all learners within an educational institution. Each learner may use a different set of tools to support/enhance their informal learning.

A metaphor to explain a PLN & PLE

The organization of a learning activity is like the exploration of a open doors, each of these doors is dedicated to a specific activity. This metaphor is as simulation of the real life, where there is a natural mapping between places and activities, from home or dormitory to a library, a laboratory, or even a cafeteria. Available resources for the given learning objective appear as objects inside a room. The tutor decides room appearance and topology, by placing inside them, among possible objects, some doors lead to other rooms.

Examples of content in a PLN & PLE

Tobi is a 5^th grader taking Digital Art.  Allow me to show a diagram what would his PLE will look like.

Part of his PLN are his teachers not only from Digital Art but also from other subjects; his home, school, after-school  where he work on his tasks even school cafeteria. His friends are considered as part of his PLN.

PWT are categorized from Generating & Organizing Content – these are the applications that he use to create his work like Office, Adobe and Open Source products (such as Word, Excel, Illustrator, Inkscape). He also use facebook, blog and moodle to share or submit his work.  He also read books and magazines. He loves to check youtube, schooltube, and pbskids.

As described in 7 Things you should know about (published by Educause Learning Initiative), the term personal learning environment (PLE) describes the tools, communities, and services that constitute the individual educational platforms learners use to direct their own learning and pursue educational goals.

The concept of the PLE marks a fundamental change in the role resources (people and media) play in teaching and learning. In an environment where information is ubiquitous and needs only to be located, there is a greater premium on skills that support fast and accurate access to information and on the ability to assess that information. In this regard, teaching is less a matter of data trans­mission and more a collaborative exercise in collection, orches­tration, remixing, and integration of data into knowledge building. The goal for the student shifts from a need to collect information to a need to draw connections from it—to acquire it, disseminate it, and collaborate in its use. Furthermore, the use of PLEs may herald a greater emphasis on the role that metacognition plays in learning, enabling students to actively consider and reflect upon the specific tools and resources that lead to a deeper engagement with content to facilitate their learning. Source:www.educause.edu/eli