I’m authoring this short article from a small town in Malaysia which is many miles from many of the main cities and which doesn’t enjoy, currently, the level of broadband connectivity many of us in large parts of the West have come to consider normal. It has been back to using a modem from a relative’s house for me and that has been a salutary experience and reminder about what it is like when there is no ‘always-on’ network and why the design of robust and flexible technology-enhanced-learning environments really needs to transcend the permanently attached ‘umbilical cord’ reference designs we have allowed to dominate this space to date.
In my previous posting Whose PLE is it anyway? (Auricle 2 June 2006) at the invitation of the JISC PLE Expert Group I explored some of my positions regarding Personal Learning Environments (PLEs). Since the original posting I’ve decamped to Malaysia for a few weeks but one of the articles I read before departing was the Guardian article Healthy Respect for Smart Cards (Technology Guardian 22 June 2006 p5). I found Tim Phillips’ article full of insights and issues which may also be of relevance to considerations about the design of a PLE.
I don’t want to repeat the Phillips’ article but, in summary, we can compare the incredibly ambitious NHS multi-billion GBP Connecting for Health programme (which includes a GBP 6.2 billion plan to provide a centralized summary and detailed electronic patient record (EPR) for every single UK citizen) with that where patients are given control of their own records via a smart card, i.e. they carry the card, they have the PIN, they hand it to the doctor (with an emergency PIN over-ride for emergencies). A couple of sentences are particularly telling:
“Doctors can simply paste information into the record. Those outside the network can view the record if they have a reader.” (7 GBP) {and that includes the patients themselves}.
Ok, this is an EPR we are talking about, not a PLE, but the patients certainly seem to have embraced the technology, I suspect, in large part, because they perceive control and direct benefit. They have every incentive to carry the card because there are resources on the medium that literally may be life saving and has a level of resilience that transcends what is possible with a paper-based system.
What I find particularly interesting is the apparent synergy between the centralized system and the EPR, i.e. the smartcard still has particular utility and high value specifically because it can be detached from the central system, but yet can be updated via the latter; that is totally congruent with what I argued in my previous Auricle posting Whose PLE is it anyway? One of the key conceptual breakthroughs demonstrated by the Phillips’ article is that the best information owners are the subjects of the information. With regard to the PLE and its relationship to the current MLE/VLEs one of the mental hurdles we perhaps have to overcome first is the belief that the centre needs to remain owner of the information rather than the vehicle for its dissemination to persons and their own devices and environments. For example, substitute the Phillips article’s Electronic Patient Record (EPR) for Electronic Student Record (ESR).
Smartcards undoubtedly have a high convenience factor but, to date, the storage capacity of these devices is somewhat limited and so, in the context of the PLE, we may have to look to devices with somewhat greater capacity, e.g. the flashdrive/ thumbdrive which again can be protected with a PID. As the memory capacity of these devices rises and their costs continue to fall then there is scope for the creative designers of learning environments to move in. But I’m not talking about the passive downloading of proprietary Blackboard or WebCT content here. Our ‘filling stations’ need to be a little more sophisticated than that.
Perhaps it would be helpful if we stopped thinking of the next generation of VLEs as evolutionary iterations of what we currently have, i.e. first generation VLEs with bits added on. As is well known, I believe the current VLE architectures, and the de facto dominance of a few proprietary offerings, have placed us all in a design and mental cul-de-sac. It’s for this reason that it’s refreshing to see that some of our colleagues in the PLE Experts Group are thinking more broadly and, yes, synergistically work that’s taking place in this space. The question is, as usual, whether we can (or want to) break out of the consequent inertia six and more years of technology influenced/directed (not technology enhanced) learning may now have built into the system.
