I’ve been running across the concept of Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) recently in various blog posts, so when I noticed that Webjunction would be offering a PLE-focused webinar, I signed up! I didn’t get in right away, due to a glitch in the login, but I came in just as the meat of the presentation got going.
Notes
“PLE’s provide tools to allow users to take control of and manage their own learning”
3 principles of PLE
- Interaction
- Usability
- Relevance
Why? “provide physical evidence of your self-taught skills” – great reasoning!!
Time? a few hours on setup plus brief, frequent visits with weeklyish review of information
Tools? Ajax start page (iGoogle, NetVibes, Protopage, Pageflakes etc.) recommended
Protopage offers mash-up of feeds – one feed box with all feeds included. Nice!
Topic searching services – del.icio.us, CiteULike, Technorati, Google Blog Search, SlideShare & Twitter Tracking – they all provide RSS results that you can pull into your PLE
“use what other people have already done”
www.pageflakes.com/mlx/14579658 – her “starter” PLE page, examples and information about PLEs
Review – Discussion – Evaluation
Her blog
The first slide I actually saw was a survey – how do you keep your learning stuff organized? The options were journaling, bookmarking, post-its, lists and something else I’ve already forgotten. I chose journaling because, as any long-time reader can attest – I do a lot of my learning and, perhaps more importantly, my thinking through what I’m learning, right here in the pages of this blog (posts of this blog? whichever…). Add an Ajax start page (and I already use iGoogle) with a focus on each of the topics I’d like to know more about with a way for me to easily post my thoughts about my learning here and I’ll have a darn near workable PLE of my own!
Update The archived Webinar that I attended is here
