I’ve been trying to record an interview with Oleg Liber, Director of CETIS for some months and we finally managed to get together on the 14 December at one of the events in the Higher Education Academy’s new Innovation Academy series; the event being entitled Open Source VLEs: The Next Generation. So this podcast interview on Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) was recorded live at the event and it’s brought to Auricle readers ‘warts and all’, or at least air conditioning system and all. You’ll find it in the podcast panel at the top of Auricle for a while and also in the podcast archive but I also offer some commentary and reflections. Following my recorded interview and my opening remarks to the delegates Oleg gave a stimulating presentation on PLEs to the assembled multitude.
Oleg was involved in the development of the Colloquia VLE way back in the late 1990s which, arguably, suffered from being conceptually ahead of its time. It’s fair to say that Colloquia was a relative minnow swimming in the sea with the big fish Blackboard, WebCT, Solstra, Lotus Learning Space et al, but those that took the trouble to study it would have found much of interest.
Whereas the big fish grew from a content delivery perspective of design, Colloquia’s ethos was of messaging being the core activity around which all else swam. The email inbox was, therefore, the agent by which the environment received its inputs and disseminated its outputs. No central repository here. Due to its architecture, this early personal learning environment was not permanently dependent on the umbilical cord of the permanent network connection. When connected to the network it refreshed itself via email and so the learner could work offline.
Colloquia’s still around, but the focus of the personal learning environment workappears to be grounded in the JISC funded Personal Learning Environments reference model; a visit to the project’s blog is encouraged.
To illustrate his presentation Oleg highlighted the Stanford on iTunes initiative which is using Apples iTunes to automatically disseminate lectures, interviews, music and support. What’s interesting about this example is how two major brands from totally different contexts have been merged in a way that no Blackboard, WebCT or other proprietary vendor has yet managed to do. The lesson here is perhaps to do a limited amount of things functionally, but to do it very well. Again, the irony here is that the conceputually simple iTunes tool can achieve so much.
I’ve waxed lyrical in the past about the rather nasty reality that if a Harry Potter analogue waved a magic wand tomorrow and banished all existing VLEs and MLEs et al into outer darkness e-learning would still survive, or perhaps even thrive. There would undoubtedly be a temporary hiatus for many, but then would come a period of adaptation during which the many existing tools and services would come into their own at the teaching coalface. iTunes at Stanford provides but one example. And yes there would still be role for learning technologists; perhaps even a richer one than we have currently, but the ingredients making up the ‘environment’ would not necessarily lie within the institution but would instead be in a multitude of places. And yes there would be risks, unpredictability, disappearing services and data, but still we would survive … because we would rapidly learn how to and because there would be alternatives to current central infrastructures.
On a related matter to the above, Oleg raised an interesting question that is unlikely to win the vote of many University IT directors, but remains interesting nevertheless, i.e. do Universities have to act as de facto ISPs at all? Uncomfortable thought perhaps, but the same argument to the above may apply, i.e. a temporary hiatus followed by a period of adaptation when the infrastructure is re-built from what is now ‘out there’. But I must admit I do find that idea is out of my personal comfort zone, so thanks for destabilization Oleg:)
It’s kind of hard to draw any conclusions of the likely impact of Personal Learning Environments upon the average HE institution. On the one hand we have examples like Stanford and the presence and increasing uptake of tools and ‘environments’ like weblogs, wikis, RSS aggregators, bookmarking and picture sharing services, and social networking solutions aplenty. But yet we also have the picture of some of our esteemed institutions of learning perceiving themselves as immune from disruptive technologies. The assertion here is that such institutions become technological ghettos which don’t adapt to student expectations and which simply and conveniently (for themselves) view e-learning provision as being limited to the central controlled VLE embedded within the centrally controlled MLE. In a UK context the potential gotcha! for such immunized HE institutions is the investment that’s been made in technologies like interactive whiteboards and the training in their use in primary and, particularly, secondary schools does raise an expectation in students that moving on to Higher Education is a progressive step, not a retrograde one.
Oleg Liber makes a further valid point. Despite years of development, the current generation of VLEs provide tools primarily for teachers, administrators, and system lords, not students. That doesn’t fit easily with our protestations of concern with the student experience and in being student centred. The Liber analogy of the supermarket is an interesting one, i.e. as ‘customers’ we can choose to shop in many shops so that when one doesn’t meet our needs we can move to another one. Of course the problem may be that we don’t really view students as customers at all, but more as the ‘product’ to be managed, and so we increasingly tend towards building a monopoly Wal-Mart and closing down the smaller competition. The alternative of giving students tools which interoperate to manage their own learning may just be too uncomfortable, just too disruptive of the status quo. Let’s consider that status quo for a moment.
In my ALT-C 2004 paper I highlighted the following realities:
Institutional teaching and learning strategies have been written, MLE/VLE investments have already been made, integration with information and records systems has occurred, contracts have been signed, training programmes are designed, faculty and students have already been ‘trained’, content is already being ‘locked-in’, reputations are at stake; and everyone has got used to one system … For many at the coalface e-learning has become their VLE vendor�s product � and from a central support services perspective the less diversity to support the better.
And what about those ‘special’ relationships? Here’s something I hear quite often.
We’ve built a good relationship with our vendor over a number of years and don’t want to disturb that …
Taking account of the above the advent of PLEs is unlikely to visibly disrupt centralized institutional provision in the short term and so we’re left with several possible futures.
First, PLEs have missed the boat and don’t fit with the industrialisation model being promulgated by some, e.g. see my previous Auricle post e-Learning Industrialization – will the ‘customers’ like it? (13 November 2005).
Second, there’s the development of a quasi parallel universe in which PLEs are used relatively unnoticed by the centralized systems. The latter carries on obliviously assuming that what is provided is what is actually doing the e-learning business when in fact ‘real’ e-learners have gone elsewhere.
Third, PLEs become a bit like modern mobile phones or other mobile devices in that they can plug into the network or central infrastructure for some functions or content ‘refreshment’ but can also do useful work when not so connected, i.e. a bit like the original Colloquia.
The third possible future is the most attractive but would still need a massive redesign of what currently exists in the MLE/VLE world with the architectures of the latter, despite the rhetoric of interoperability, still resulting in dependence upon a specific platform.
But perhaps I’m being too pessimistic. Terry Anderson offers us Educational Social Overlay Networks which seems to view what could be viewed as nascent PLEs as a synergistic part of the essential mix.
In my opening remarks to the conference I used the example of the Samson Iron Horse which was a motorized tractor-like device introduced in the early part of the 20th century. What was unique about this tractor was that it was steered by reins with the farmer walking behind it.
Why you may ask?
Simple … the developers thought that because farmers were used to horse drawn ploughs they had better give them something similar to what they were used to. The Samson Iron Horse didn’t survive because better ways of steering were adopted and that’s why we don’t see any rein steered vehicles today. But I kind of feel our current VLEs are a bit like Samson Iron Horses which urgently need to be replaced with a better design and, who knows, PLEs may go some way towards this day … assuming of course they are given some space to develop.
That’s why JISC’s sponsorship of work of this nature is so important. Long may it continue!
But the forces of industrialization may, of course, have a different perspective.
