Flexknowlogy – Jared Stein's ARCHIVED blog – update to jaredstein.org

Chris Lott captured most of my thoughts and feelings about the Personal Learning Environments All-Day Workshop that we conducted with Scott Leslie, however I wanted to reciprocate to my co-presenters and the participants by posting a few comments and observations (more…)

My first attempt at drafting a map of my personal learning environment came out better than I expected. I didn’t utilize any of the physical space metaphors I’d planned to use, instead opting for a fast mapping solution through Excel that showed strong relationships (matched edges) as well as weaker relationships (arrows).

PLE Mapping, Draft 1
Originally uploaded by Mr_Stein

You’ll note that I did not limit myself to technologies, let alone Web-based tools as some have been inclined to do. I’ve used all tools, utilities, and resources that make up my actual environment for teaching, learning and professional/creative production.

I know much of the discussion of PLE’s centered on the idea of using technology as an all-containing hub, and while I see significant usefulness in hubs (my own primary hubs are Google Reader, Twitter, and my own blogs) I am beginning to believe that a single hub is not the answer, and PLEs should not be encompassed by a single product or service. For instance, Ron Lubensky defines the primary goal for a PLE as follows:

The primary goal of a PLE for an individual is to bring all the disparate artefacts of interest for learning under a single operating roof. … PLEs are meant to simplify managing these artefacts…

I have two problems with this goal as stated:

1. It is akin to the goals of monolithic learning management systems, and seems to vie for a “one-size-fits-all” approach. Scott Wilson with the Personal Learning Environment blog says, “It’s an unfortunate tendency especially in our sector to take a concept (PLE, e-Portfolio) and attempt to reify it as a product.”
2. Because individuals with several generally distinct interests likely have multiple origination/entry points for learning, one all-encompassing, multitudinous hub may not be optimum for effectiveness (it may in fact be distracting; I’ve found this to be the case with a fully-loaded iGoogle home page)

Speaking of my several generally distinct interests, I was initially inclined to separate my teaching and creation activities from this map. Arguably not “learning” by some strict definitions, but certainly from a “learning by doing” perspective. At any rate, teaching, creating, and learning seem to me to be inextricably intertwined.

Before responding to the (apparently provocative) question posed by Chris Lott this week, “What does your PLE look like?”, I have one genuine question that precludes defining one’s PLE (playing into the indictment of the concept in what D’Arcy Norman initially showed as his PLE) is what is the utilitarian scope of a PLE? Presumptively we are primarily talking about networked utilities (e-mail, Web) but clearly also just plain digital utilities (computer, files [I think Ray mentioned desktop searching]), now how about the physical realm? My office? My phone? Pens and papers? My bookshelf? My colleague’s office? The library?

I ask this question without facetiousness, because if we’re talking about a holistic look at individuals learning environment, we certainly don’t want to restrict it to Web, and I even think just brainstorming the variety and interconnectedness of utilities and tools in our non-digital learning environment(s) may validly inform our digital ones, and can provide anecdotes through which we can better adapt (ourselves and others) to the online tools.

As far as my PLE, though I outlined a laundry list in your wiki, I’m now trying to think about it more organically. I’m currently toying with conceptualizing my digital PLE through a metaphor of physical space, with interconnected rooms and even “wormholes” that take me in and out of the “real” world. While at first I imagined this as a house with multi-doored, hexagonal rooms and intermediary halls (plus windows one can jump out of and back into the “real world”),

Walter R. Tschinkel’s cast of an ant colony, The nest architecture of the Florida harvester ant

it might end up being more simply sketched as the architecture of an ant colony. This latter metaphor is probably seems particularly apt to anyone who knows me, as my “train of thought” is more akin to a state of ants scurrying from one point to another as they forage with semi-obscured motivations and objectives, constantly adjusting based on new and immediate information.

I’ve read a number of blog posts and articles about learning management systems (LMS) and personal learning environments (PLE) as of late. LMSs, once the darling of educational technologists, have been getting a sound thwacking inspired by the recent Blackboard patent lawsuit victory. In almost a stars-aligning continuity, PLEs have been gaining more attention and support as “Web 2.0″ technologies have improved, broadened, and gained in popularity amongst communities. Several aspects of both have risen to the top of my constantly-refilled cup of questioning: LMS as a “walled garden”, PLE as perhaps pedagogically superior but strategically tenuous or immature, and the lack of full debates between the two approaches to technology-enhanced education.

George Siemens blogs up just exactly the news I’m interested in week after week, and on the 28th he posted up a reference to Peter Tittenberger’s short piece The Strength of Garden Walls found on his a touch of frost blog. This article describes the percieved value of institutionally administered learning management systems and social software tools as “walled gardens” for their ability to provide teacher control over user access to learning materials and tools, and the distribution of the participants’ input and output.

(I should restate that, for most institutionally administered social software tools are set up specifically to inhibit or even disallow public access and public viewing, often out of fear of legal repercussions for providing access to students’ personally identifiable information (e.g. in the United States, FERPA in higher education and K-12). For example, LMS’s natively restrict public access, typically don’t allow publishing of student work outside the password-protected site, and authentication access is often provided only through the institution’s student information system. So walled gardens don’t really provide teachers with control, they simply give teachers a box of handcuffs, sans keys.)

My perception is that most of the prominent folks involved in new teaching and educational technology believe that the walled garden approach is “bad”, that LMSs are “bad”, and that open, learner-centered strategies, such as personal learning environments (PLE) are “good” (or at least “better”) because they better reflect or adapt to current Internet-driven trends in networked information and social connectivity. To elaborate:

• Educators who believe in fostering authentic learning experiences have become increasingly disillusioned with the walled garden of the LMS. Increasingly popular “real world” Web-based social software has cast many LMS tools as redundant.

• Many institutionally adopted learning tools, driven by the perceived needs of the institution, directed by non-faculty IT, and limited by the pace of administration, are rarely able to maintain currency with readily available “real world” tools simply because the institution has neither a massive, global audience to demand innovations, nor the breadth of competitive capitalism to fund and incentivize them. Tools provided by education-centric companies such as Blackboard often come in packages, overproduced versions of real-world tools tightly bound to provide a one-stop-shopping experience, and therefore a supposed panacea for all educational technology needs. Few Web application companies would commit such an act hubris–Google has proven itself fairly capable of such a Heraclean act, with competitors Yahoo! and even Microsoft taking tentative stabs of their own.

• Educators personally committed to ideals and philosophies of openness–open source, open access, open publishing–are also frustrated with LMSs and other institutionally controlled software for their innate closed-ness through restriction of access for both contributors and readers.

• And while distinctions between the accuracy of definitions and theories of collective intelligence and connective intelligence are being debated, they share a common recognition that there is significant value in community-involved (influenced?) and socially-invigorated education. Educators who ascribe to such learning theories also find the walled garden approach to be too limiting and lacking provisions for social networking within the institution, let alone the world.

These common postures (I’m abusing that word this week–thanks, Scott) taken against the “walled garden” approach to educational technology are sound, but I do not want to suggest that the LMS is therefore obsolete, for I have presented (and probably insufficiently) only one side of the issue. I daresay there are as many sound arguments the use of walled gardens and even the traditional LMS. And though I have seen Scott Leslie weigh pro’s and cons of “loosely coupled” approaches and even one or two ed tech bloggers recognize the continuing significance of the LMS, I’ve not yet seen a full and complete debate involving people genuinely committed to each of the two sides. (If anyone is game for staging one, my alter-ego would be happy to suppress my doubts completely and take the pro-LMS side–in fact, my ego would probably not let me resign that side to anyone else!)

In my opinion, a really good debate on the subject would illustrate philosophical differences between the two sides, and might even invoke political stances (technology adoption in education [if not pedagogy in general] as “conservative” vs. “progressive”; information access and publishing as an issue of power, definable through capitalist or socialist anarchist ideals, etc).

Even if the outcome of such a debate was largely in favor of an authenticopenconnectedcollective strategy, there are of course still questions about how a PLE is LE really looks and acts like, if it is teachable. Just today on Twitter there were a number of provocative questions about the value of PLE, either as a term or as a “single”, methodological approach.

Add to that the problem that I personally still can not say with total conviction that the LMS is obsolete. Folks like myself have talked up the potential value of PLEs, but broad adoption of the PLE is currently impossible because key technologies and services are still being developed (e.g. good hubs of aggregation [go eduGlu]) or have not yet been widely adopted (e.g. OpenID). Compound that with faculty and administrative anxieties regarding new technologies and teaching approaches, and I can only conclude that the LMS will be around for a long time yet. So until fully viable (every need) and broadly accessible (every application) alternative strategies and methods become available, we might as well openly examine, in good-faith, the value of the LMS, the benefits of walled garden systems, and our reasonings for choosing one or the other.

This shirt is based on a workshop title suggestion Scott Leslie made (half?) jokingly over a Skype meeting.

I’m considering ordering up a batch of these from UberPrints.com for my crew at DE. PLE is People! That’s all you need to know.