Personal learning environment

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The term Personal Learning Environment (PLE short, German Personal Learning Environment ) is not clearly defined, but can be understood as a concept of individual design of their own learning environment. The most important aspect is that the learner has this environment under his control and personalizes his learning and working environment in order to develop knowledge and share it with others. Although the purely linguistic translation basically means the entire personal learning environment (e.g. desk, library, computer, newspaper, etc.), the technical implementation of a PLE in research essentially means the individual compilation of (social) software, web -Services and mobile technologies, which support the mostly informal learning with the computer, understood.

Concept history

The term Personal Learning Environments arose in early 2000 as part of the discussion on Virtual Learning Environment (VLE for short), an approach in which traditional structures, roles and processes from formal education in a virtual learning environment (e.g. earlier forms of learning Management systems, LMS for short) can be simulated. In contrast to the Virtual Learning Environment approach, the Personal Learning Environment approach strives for a higher degree of pedagogical and technical innovation, especially through a person-centered use of modern digital media.

Lifelong learning

Lifelong learning as a concept, the ability to possess or acquire the ability to further educate oneself depending on the situation and independently, is the main motivation for research on PLEs. Driven by a (computer) society that is moving ever faster and in which product cycles are also getting shorter and shorter, you have to be able to familiarize yourself with new domains quickly and in a problem-oriented manner and to acquire knowledge. However, this also entails new demands on people and software. People must be able to shape and orientate their learning themselves. Software should be able to support him as much as possible in finding suitable information, making his own available, exchanging knowledge with others and allowing reflection on what has been written or published in order to support learning. Especially since the learning situations are diverse, because they arise in very different contexts (e.g. (project) work, hobbies, etc.), a PLE should be able to offer the learner a flexible environment that he or she can use can design according to his requirements.

Informal learning

As the study shows, around 70% of the continuing education of working people consists of informal learning. In particular, this refers to learning on the job, which in very few cases consists of formal further training. However, it has been shown with the development and research of PLEs that the informal continuing education that is already available must be supported. The aim is, on the one hand, to give the learner the opportunity to collectively make the programs and services they are already using available and, on the other hand, to support learning by composing them. Technically, links between the tools could also be created for this purpose or databases could be made available in such a way that persistence of the converging knowledge artifacts can be guaranteed.

Functions of a PLE

Graham Attwell et al. describe several functionalities that should be part of a PLE:

  • Searching for information: Access to information is essential in order to be able to initiate a learning process based on the situation. The learning process can only be efficiently promoted through the possibility of specifically identifying information in different sources (with possibly different focuses in terms of content).
  • Collecting and structuring: A PLE must offer the learner the opportunity to collect the information found from a wide variety of sources and to structure it in a way that makes sense for him. On the one hand it should help to get an overview of the available material, on the other hand the learner can reflect on the connections and differences between the individual artifacts. This can help him separate the information that is most relevant to him.
  • Edit: After the learner has identified information that is relevant to himself, he may want to. U. expand so that they correspond to his specific problem or he would like to enrich them with his own knowledge about the corresponding knowledge domain. To do this, it must be possible to process such knowledge artifacts.
  • Analysis: In order to adapt information to a specific problem situation, it must first be analyzed. This analysis can be done alone, but can also be done in exchange with other people who have experience in dealing with this or other similar problems.
  • Reflection : Reflection on, for example, what has been read can serve to uncover comprehension difficulties or weaknesses in the content of a document. This can then lead to the learner working even more deeply on a topic in order to be able to understand the entire area relevant to him. This reflection can e.g. B. by writing an article, a blog entry or by talking to friends or colleagues.
  • Presenting: It must be possible to present solutions to problems to one's own colleagues or friends. This can be done with the help of slides, brochures or by writing an email.
  • Representation: In contrast to presentation , representation aims to publish aggregations and analyzes of artifacts and the newly created knowledge artifacts in a more general form, so that with the help of it not only the same problem can be solved again, but also a problem that goes beyond it Added value is gained. This is accompanied by the effect that the learner presents himself and his area of interest .
  • Sharing: One of the most relevant points is the possibility of sharing knowledge with others, on the one hand not only to benefit from newly gained knowledge and on the other hand to receive new information from other people.
  • Networking: Establishing connections with other people is the most important aspect in order to be able to efficiently implement the points mentioned above. Only in this way can it be possible to obtain information effectively. Only people who themselves have a certain level of knowledge in a knowledge domain can quickly and specifically point out materials, information or meta-knowledge (e.g. everyday problems). By the way, in many situations it is normal life to ask a friend or colleague about a problem, because one assumes that with their help you will reach your goal faster than if you had to familiarize yourself with a complete domain from scratch.

See also

literature

  • Graham Attwell, Jenny Bimrose, Alan Brown, Sally-Anne Barnes: Maturing learning: Mash up Personal Learning Environments . In: Fridolin Wild, Marco Kalz, Matthias Palmér (Eds.): Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Mashup Personal Learning Environments (MUPPLE08) Maastricht, The Netherlands, September 17, 2008. In conjunction with the 3rd European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL'08), Maastricht School of Management, Maastricht, The Netherlands, 18. – 19. September 2008 . Vol. 388. Maastricht September 17, 2008 ( informatik.rwth-aachen.de [PDF; 58 kB ]).
  • Graham Attwell: Personal Learning Environments for creating, consuming, remixing and sharing . In: David Griffiths, Rob Koper, Oleg Liber (Eds.): Service Oriented Approaches and Lifelong Competence Development Infrastructures: Proceedings of the 2nd TENCompetence Open Workshop . Institute of Educational Cybernetics, Bolton 2007, ISBN 0-907311-22-9 , pp. 36-41 ( hdl: 1820/1023 ).
  • Graham Attwell: The Personal Learning Environments - the future of eLearning? In: eLearning Papers . Vol. 2, No. 1 , 2007, ISSN  1887-1542 ( elearningeuropa.info [PDF; 117 kB ]).
  • Ilona Buchem, Graham Attwell & Ricardo Torres: Understanding Personal Learning Environments: Literature review and synthesis through the Activity Theory lens . In: Proceedings of the The PLE Conference 2011, 10. – 12. July 2011 . Southampton ( webscience.org ).
  • Sandra Schaffert, Marco Kalz: Personal learning environments: Basics, possibilities and challenges of a new concept. In: Handbook E-Learning . Vol. 5, No. 5.16 , 2009, ISBN 978-3-87156-298-3 , pp. 1-24 ( hdl: 1820/1573 ).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Ed.): Integrated general report on the further training situation in Germany . Bonn April 2003 ( bmbf.de [PDF; 2.0 MB ]). bmbf.de ( Memento of the original from February 28, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.bmbf.de
  2. ^ Graham Attwell: The Personal Learning Environments - the future of eLearning? In: eLearning Papers . Vol. 2, No. 1 , 2007, ISSN  1887-1542 ( elearningeuropa.info [PDF; 117 kB ]). elearningeuropa.info ( Memento of the original from March 6, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.elearningeuropa.info
  3. ↑ Tobias Nelkner, Wolfgang Reinhardt, Graham Attwell: Concept of a Tool Wrapper Infrastructure for Supporting Services in a PLE . In: Andreas Schmidt, Graham Attwell, Simone Braun, Stefanie Lindstaedt, Ronald Maier, Eric Ras (Eds.): 1st International Workshop on Learning in Enterprise 2.0 and Beyond . Vol. 383, 2008 ( mature-ip.eu [PDF; 525 kB ]).
  4. ↑ Graham Attwell, Jenny Bimrose, Allan Brown, Sally Anne Barnes: Maturing learning: Mash up Personal Learning Environment. In: Fridolin Wild, Marco Kalz, Matthias Palmér (Eds.): Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Mashup Personal Learning Environments (MUPPLE08) Maastricht. Vol. 388, 2008 ( informatik.rwth-aachen.de [PDF; 60 kB ]).