I assume it’s because I’ve waxed lyrical about related matters in Auricle and various conference presentations that I’ve been asked by the CETIS Personal Learning Environment Experts Group to contribute my ‘position’ on Personal Learning Environments (PLEs). Although I’m wary of accepting the mantle of ‘expert’ – there are none in this area – I am more than happy to share my current thinking, subject to the caveat that the other contributors to this group will undoubtedly have positions of their own which may well be different to mine. Auricle readers are welcome to extract, or savage, whatever personal positions you can find herein. All of my positions are interdependent.
Position Statement 1: SIMPLICITY AND SYNERGY WORKS
Personal Learning Environments need to have the ease of use and exhibit the usefulness of my Podcast Management Environment, i.e. a PME (just kidding about the PME but there’s a serious message to follow). Arguably, contained in my definition of a podcast below there are key attributes of the managing environment (highlighted) which transforms the experience of what would otherwise be no more than the act of downloading an audio (or other media) file.
Def: Podcast
A usually compressed digital media file (usually, but not always, music or – and – speech) which can be pre-selected and routinely scheduled to be automatically downloaded via RSS to a computer or mobile listening/player device, e.g. an MP3 player/iPod.
The position above is not conceptually complex but there are, however, still some complexities implicit in what I have asserted that I think putative PLE designers need to be influenced by. For example, it was the conceptual and technical joining up of apparently disparate bits that made podcasting possible, i.e. the exploitation of easy to author and use RSS, the development of applications that understood how to handle this RSS, the widespread adoption of compressed media formats like MP3, the now ubiquitous ultra portable devices that can handle such compressed media formats, and, of course, we mustn’t forget the growth of broadband which increasingly enables the ‘internet as a filling station’ experience (see below) to be a positive one. Again, arguably, the podcast lesson is that it’s perhaps better that an environment contains artefacts and tools that do a limited number of things really well rather than any single one attempting to become the definitive multipurpose swiss-army-knife of functionality. That, of course, should not prevent the user building their personal swiss-army-knife from what they find useful around them.
Position Statement 2: THINK ‘FILLING STATIONS’ RATHER THAN LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEMS
I’ve authored a series of past Auricle postings on the general theme of a A ‘filling station’ model of e-learning in which I argue that the far from seeking to tether the user to the computer, the network, or even the high definition television, the advent of ultra mobile devices, e.g. iPods, portable video players, multifunction phones etc, demonstrates that what are really useful to users are portable personal environments that empowers them and enables them to carry ‘their stuff’ around with them for consumption or analysis whenever and wherever they like.
We need to be able to cut the umbilical cords without a ‘personal’ environment collapsing. Consider the example of the podcast above. The humble MP3 player may from the user’s perspective actually be the key component in their personal environment (for learning and entertainment) and so it is that which matters most to them. The organisational and delivery infrastructure, therefore, needs to work in synergy with their personal environments so that it empowers users and enables them to take charge of when and where the consume, analyse, reflect, or whatever. The umbilical cord of computers, networks etc needs to be viewed more from a filling station perspective where the role of the internet/intranet is to provide the ‘fuel’ for the personal environment and perhaps, at times, to provide the transaction infrastructure during intermittent periods of connectivity. Transactions in this context include the opportunities for synchronous discussion in whatever form they take (IM, VoIP, etc). What do I mean by Life Support Systems? I have in mind the current MLE/VLE online session model for this plaudit.
Position Statement 3: PERSONAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS ALREADY EXIST?
Auricle readers will perhaps know that I’ve authored a whole series of postings under the general banner of The weblog as the model for a new type of virtual learning environment? (starting 25 Feb 2004). The most efficient way of accessing the whole series is probably through Auricle’s category view of the archive under the section ‘MLE/VLE/Portals’. I’ve also argued in previous postings that if a magic wand was to remove all current MLEs/VLEs that, far from spelling the end of e-learning (as we currently know it), such an apparent cataclysmic event could actually refresh our thinking. Why? Because, in reality there are many tools and services available outside the bailiwick of campus ICT provision which could be exploited for learning, teaching and support purposes by academic staff and students.
The main victims of this theoretical Armageddon would not be those engaged in teaching and learning; in reality it could be large scale administrative/management systems (and those supporting them) that could suffer and it’s that issue which I will attempt to address in Position Statement 4.
Let’s now consider some examples of environments that already exist.
The humble, and now ubiquitous, weblog could make a major contribution when used for course announcements, file transfer and statements of position and subsequent commentary. The irony is that mainstream proprietary VLEs have tended to view the announcements section of their products as almost peripheral to the main content delivery action whereas the weblog places the ‘announcements’ at the centre of the action. Of course, since I wrote the original Auricle posting super-charged weblog-like environments like ELGG have come on to the scene and that certainly begins to represent the type of solution I was thinking about in 2004. Is ELGG, therefore, not a personal learning environment?
Although I have some serious concerns about ‘lock in’ to any one service like this, some well known and high profile institutions appear to have decided that the ubiquitous iTunes is also a serious contender in the personal environment stakes, e.g. Stanford on iTunes, Podcasts at Penn State, and Berkeley on iTunes U. Is iTunes used in this context not a learning environment (or at least a part thereof?). I find this use of iTunes interesting although that’s not to say I’m comfortable with placing it in the personal learning environment bucket (see Position Statement 4).
We can also need to add the whole of the emergent Google stable of Web and Web 2.0 services, Flickr, del.icio.us, social writing platforms like Writely or the wiki-oriented SocialText, the BBC iPlayer, Netvibes, Protopage, Backpack, Kiko Calendar, PubSub, Furl, Bloglines, Blogdigger, Yahoo360, et al to the potential personal environment mix.
Mix is probably the operative word here. Reuse and repurposing in this context focuses less on the concept of ‘content as a discrete package’ or even ‘content as a fortress’ envisaged by some putative gourmets at a learning objects feast and more on the mixing of functionalities and content which then offers something greater than the sum of the parts.
Enter then the Web mashup in which new child environments can access some of the functionality and combine the content of one or more other sites into something new. For example consider [url=http://www.chicagocrime.org/map/]Chicago Crime[/url] which combines output from the Chicago Police database and Google Maps or Housing Maps or bashR (which combines the output of Wikipedia, Flickr, and del.icio.us). A more functionally oriented mashup is perhaps represented by Jon Udell’s LibraryLookup Project which enables users to automatically check whether a book available via, say, the Amazon Web site is available in a local library. It may be tempting to think that such remixing and repurposing is a bit on the ‘dark side’ but even the BBC is engaged and is actively supporting it in their BBC Backstage initiative. The remix or mashup becomes possible because some systems are designed to share/make available at least part of their content and functionality. It’s ironic that some of the best examples of this genre have emerged from the commercial sector, e.g. Amazon Web Services. Why do they do it? The answer is fairly easy, opening up and allowing others to exploit what you do means users keep coming back. The creation of some mashups (not the use of) is still the province of creative geeks but there are other approaches that are usually based on the aggregation of RSS feeds which are well within the province of the technophobe, e.g. Netvibes, or Bloglines.
What I’ve suggested above, when aggregated with view of the ‘internet/intranet as a filling station’, means that I’m not sure whether a single HE sector personal learning environment is actually going to be possible, or whether it is even desirable. For example, is the MP3 player, when it is used to play Stephen Downes’ frequent ‘pearls of wisdom’ or the ITConversations podcasts, not acting as a personal learning environment? It may be perfectly possible and desirable, therefore, to have a multitude of personal learning environments because users decide whether portable virtual or physical device ‘xyz’ is useful and therefore merits inclusion in their personal learning toolkit. Portability as an attribute of a virtual device may seem a strange concept but do not some of the Web 2.0 tools and applications, e.g. Writely offer at least a modicum of freedom from dependence on one static box? You may still need access to a computer, but at least it can be any computer sited anywhere in the world.
To wrap up this section I suppose what concerns me here is that a lot of, ultimately wasted, effort could go into attempting to create the definitive PLE. We could end up in the situation where would-be entrants to the current VLE market (if there are any left?) attempt to take market share from the incumbents by adding increasing layers of functionality and end up adding complexity. iTunes, iPods and would-be pretenders to that throne appear to be succeeding primarily because they do limited things well, implement the ‘filling station’ model, and also allow a modicum of personal choice (albeit sometimes constrained by non-standard technical formats and digital rights management). So let’s not forget the ‘P’ in personal, but I’ll return to this in Position Statement 4.
Position Statement 4: WHOSE PLE IS IT ANYWAY? – OR – THERE IS MORE THAN ONE MOTHER-SHIP?
I believe the examples in the previous sections encapsulate something of critical importance to the future of Personal Learning Environments (whatever multifaceted forms they take) and that is their potential to be either perceived as, or to become actual, threats to the status quo.
For example, I have been fascinated by the difficulties some institutions appear to have in adjusting their ICT policies to allow their staff and students to have access to weblogs or wikis. Rather than adjust Acceptable Use Policies some seem more inclined to opt for an overall ban, or at least not to actively promote the affordances of some of the new tools available.
There’s an implicit Catch-22 for nascent PLE designers here, i.e. design a PLE that fits in with a highly centralized MLE model and which will, therefore, have a high degree of institutional palatability or, alternatively, design a PLE that’s actually ultra-flexible, extensible, usable, and robust; can function usefully for a time without attachment to the umbilical cord of a single mother-ship, and above all, is perceived to be genuinely useful to the users (as they define usefulness). Such a PLE, however, may not resonate with the desire of the institution to retain command and control even, while it is simultaneously declaring its student-centred ethos and belief in personalisation, i.e. within the defined boundaries and provision set by the institution. For example, the Colloquia learning environment always quite impressed me. It seemed to me that it had some of the characteristics of what we would now call a PLE. It perhaps suffered from being ahead of its time. One of the things that exercised the minds of, at least some, central IT services people who were aware of Colloquia was that using the email inbox as the ‘engine’ for input and output to the environment made it difficult to ‘track’ what was going on, i.e. a model that didn’t fit in with the dominant client server model or the Learning Management System ethos. I seem to remember the development team even making modifications that would enable it to function in more client-server oriented way but, by this time, the big proprietary sharks were established alpha predators in the VLE sea and so Colloquia did not get the attention it perhaps deserved.
The PLE as MLE/VLE satellite concept that causes me such concern is represented by the type of product below. I don’t know it it’s meaningful but the original Web site marketing the product seems to have disappeared. I also tried to locate it on the Blackboard Building Blocks site without luck.
I believe there is a considerable risk that, because of the investments already made in institutional Learning Management Systems that the dominant concept of the PLE becomes that of being a satellite of the institutional MLE/VLE. To put it more graphically, the PLE ends being dependent on one fixed mother-ship for its sustenance and transactions (a la the Blackboard To Go example above). If so, that merely propagates the rather unsatisfactory model of e-learning we have currently, i.e. the bias is skewed towards investment in architectures and infrastructure which enhance technical and administrative systems whose emphasis is actually ‘management’ of learning provision (e-administration) and content delivery (e-delivery) rather than enhancement of learning.
The PLE as satellite of the VLE perhaps also raises questions of who the real owners of such environments are. If the alleged PLE is, in reality, a vehicle for an institutional prescription and functions only as an appendage to the VLE then why should the anticipated users view it as PLE at all? That’s perhaps also where viewing the likes of iTunes (or similar) as quasi PLEs begins to fall down (no matter how high profile the institution that’s pressing it into service), i.e. iTunes can be used as a neat way of delivering some types of institutionally-derived content without custom development effort, that’s all. Such uses of iTunes or similar is closer perhaps to the concept of personal teaching (not learning) environments. Of course weblogs, wikis etc could also be used for similar purposes.
What would I perceive to be the key characteristic of an ideal PLE? For me it would be the ability to ‘dock’ with a variety of ‘mother-ships’ or take its ‘fuel’ from a variety of ‘filling stations’ and not be limited to one, e.g. in much the same way that should I choose to do so, today I can ‘re-fuel’ from thousands of podcast sources simply by entering an RSS address via a simple interface which populates a hidden database and voila what’s important to me just arrives for my later consumption and analysis. Sure, my ideal PLE could even ‘dock’ with a VLE mother-ship, but that should be but one option, not a requirement. Frankly, even iTunes has got to represent a more efficient way of transacting material than trying to download a current generation VLE ‘course’ into something like a PDA.
And now we come to the denouement.
- Ironically, in order to create the ideal PLE, our conception and implementation of the MLE/VLE also has to change, but the Learning Management System/VLE vendors want you to use only their ‘filling station’, their ‘mother-ship’ and that’s why, despite the rhetoric of standards compatibility, they are never going to lead in this area. That job will have to be done by others.
- The error we have all tended to make in the past with MLE/VLEs, and are now in danger of repeating with PLEs, is to invest any single technological artefact, computer application, system, or platform with the moniker of ‘learning environment’ at all. The ‘learning environment’ is not, and never should be, perceived as a single technological entity. The learning environment is multifactorial and multifaceted and it is always personally interpreted and experienced. Sure, technology and technological artefacts undoubtedly contribute to what the student perceives as their learning environment and can be used to enhance (I hope) that experience, but technology can also inadvertently, or deliberately, constrain that experience. That’s why I continued to have a problem with the current form and architectures of the mainstream VLEs which are able to fly under a ‘learning’ flag of convenience but, in reality, are being driven more by the perceived administrative needs of the institution, with everything else becoming subservient to those needs. The irony here is that, as I’ve highlighted in several previous Auricle postings, even the administrative needs come to be driven by what the technologies will allow them to do, i.e. technological determinism.
… the application of the new technologies is generating a myriad of demands for re-institutionalisation of the university as a far more ‘corporate’, one might even say concrete, kind of organization … (in Cornford J (2000) The Virtual University is (paradoxically) the University Made Concrete.
… universities may be increasingly forced to consider institutional changes in order to maintain alignment with the system. (in Implications of Enterprise Resource Planning Systems for Universities: An Analysis of Benefits and Risks, Observatory on Borderless Higher Education, Issue 3, p13, April 2005). The OBHE is a subscription service.
I argue that the PLE is what occurs in people’s heads and our job is to provide flexible and rich and useful ingredients, devices, resources, and opportunities for interaction. We shouldn’t end up imprisoning users in any single virtual conception of a learning environment; that simply limits them to our current conceptions, what we can cope with, what interests us and what we consider important. That’s our learning environment, not their personal one.
In the short to medium term, I’m somewhat pessimistic about the ability of institutions and developers to meet the PLE challenge. I believe that the investment of finance, time and effort is unlikely to be expended in reforming/re-engineering basic VLE/MLE architectures and so we are likely to end up with the PLE as a current generation VLE satellite model (that is as a satellite of a defined VLE) simply because that is the line of least resistance from the proprietary status quo and inevitable vested interests; some of whom have spent years building institutional technical and support infrastructures around a non PLE. But, it would indeed be ironic, if a large amount of investment was diverted into the institutional palatability option only to find that knowledgeable users have increasingly decided that the institutional provision has ceased to be relevant, voted with their fingers and are off using, or assembling, their own personal learning environments below the institutional radar.
