About “P”!

A Personal Learning Environment (PLE) or whatever the approach of learning online & self-managing one’s own learning is called revolves around three concepts that give life to it: the user, the resources and the learning experience. The “P” in PLE is central to this approach, especially when compared to classical educational approaches. This importance is further “enabled” by the affordances technologies allow nowadays.

But how to make a learning approach or more simply an environment act on behalf of the learner is the question with many possible (and equally valid) answers. These answers try to follow a certain number of requirements/guidelines/concerns. So, what are the dimensions that govern the “personal” nature of a learning environment?

First, the learner ought to manage his/her own learning, thus defining the learning experiences he/she wants to engage in, the resources that best serve him/her to accomplish the goals he/she sets for such experiences & the tools to achieve them. This begs the question of how to let a learner in such environment, define his learning goals, build the learning experiences to achieve them, find/discover and choose the tools/resources that suit him/her best? Other questions arise as well like how to manage such learning experiences over time (storage, continuation of the experience at the left point, updates, sharing/collaboration with other learners, leveraging previous experiences etc.)?

Second, the learner should be offered means of guidance to simplify the learning process (environment usability, resource fit to learner preferences etc.), enhance his learning experience, discover new avenues he/she would not have discovered otherwise (a “stuck” in a local minimum situation as optimization people would say), which relies on “knowing” as much as possible about the learner and tying that to information about resources and learning experiences. So, what information to have about the learner (simply called learner profile)? Which information is provided by the learner and which is collected about him/her (through his/her learning patterns, from external sources etc. )? How to protect the privacy of the learner? How to allow him/her to manage such personal information, share it? How to use other learners’ information to enhance one’s own experience? How to leverage already existing personal information without reinventing the wheel or making the building of a learning experience more energy-consuming than engaging in it?

Answers to these questions will shape the personal aspect of a PLE and indeed cause its success or the failure of its adoption by learners at large.

And since each question allows many different valid answers, an “equilibrium” or to paraphrase physics, a “stable configuration” of all these aspects ought to be offered to the learner who in turn might (and most certainly will) alter it to create his/her own personal profile and THAT’s the learning becoming “personal”, allowing the learner to “own” his learning experience, control its evolution in an environment that is easy to work with.

My research is focused on defining one such “stable configuration” with the concerns, of simplicity, usability and extensibility/configurability as mandatory constraints to comply with.