Brent pre-smtwl

The Bamboo Project Blog: My Personal Learning Environment – (read the full article)

I am definitely going to learn more about this and start fleshing out my own PLE. I know I am in one and I’m tweaking and creating it each day but I never took the time to “map” it out. It’s now on my first priority stack of new projects.

To get an idea of what I mean by a personal learning environment (or PLE) , here’s a working definition from Ron Lubensky who has written a nice summary on the concept:

a Personal Learning Environment is a facility for an individual to access, aggregate, configure and manipulate digital artifacts of their ongoing learning experiences.

In other words, a PLE is a combination of the formal and informal tools and processes we use to gather information, reflect on it and do something with it, which is essentially what we mean when we talk about learning.

Note that I mention that informal learning is a big part of the PLE. By some estimates, 75-80% of on-the-job learning is done informally–that is, outside of a classroom-based (physical or virtual), highly structured learning situation. With the growth of the Internet and a variety of second generation web tools, the ability to construct a personal learning environment that emphasizes and leverages informal learning has really exploded.

So all of this stuff has been going around in my head and I thought that it made sense for me to look at my own Personal Learning Environment. Inspired by Ray Sims’ mindmap of his PLE, I first constructed my own. (It was too large to insert here in any readable form, so you’ll have to download to really see it.)

I divided it into three areas:

• Gathering Information
• Processing Information
• Acting on the Learning

I want to talk about each in more detail below.

You’ll see that I use a variety of tools and processes for each phase of learning, most of them web-based. For me, it’s been the growth of these kinds of tools that has given me the ability to create a personal learning environment and in the past year, I’ve seen a real explosion in my own growth as a result.

Brent Learning Community ple michelmarting

Beth’s Blog: Flickr Affinity Group Meeting at NTC: Here’s Nonprofit and Flickr Resource List

Brent pre-smtwl

This is an article taken from Wired Magazine. It is a great story about how a library created learning opportunities for it’s staff by putting together a series of learning experiences on Web 2.0 tools. The list will be a very useful asset in our Learning Community. I picked up on this via the Bamboo Blog which has become my “go to” site for pushing forward creative thinking for the non profit community. There are others of course but I really like how Michelle Martin is advancing the discourse for non profit involvement in web 2.0 tools.

Public Library Geeks Take Web 2.0 to the Stacks -

Beverly Hanly 03.29.07 | 2:00 AM

When the IT director at North Carolina’s Charlotte & Mecklenburg County public library began training staff in the latest web technologies, she lured reluctant participants with bribes — a free MP3 player and the chance to win a laptop.

Six months later, the program they developed is the real prize. Learning 2.0, developed by public services technology director Helene Blowers, has become a surprise grassroots hit, available for free on the web and adopted by dozens of other libraries around the globe.

“The last thing we want is for people to come into our libraries and ask about Flickr or Second Life and be met with a blank look,” said Christine MacKensie, director of the Yarra Plenty Regional Library in Melbourne, Australia, which just finished a four-month version of Learning 2.0. “And they certainly won’t now.”

Google and Microsoft are racing into libraries to digitize the world’s books, but the success of Learning 2.0 shows that the human problem of retraining workers is often being tackled from the ground up.

Recognizing that librarians need to know how to participate in the new media mix if libraries are to remain relevant, Blowers challenged her 550 staffers to become more web savvy. Using free web tools, she designed the program and gave staff members three months to do 23 things.

They created blogs and podcasts, tried out Flickr, set up RSS feeds, learned about wikis, uploaded video to YouTube, played with image generators and Rollyo, and explored Technorati, tagging and folksonomies.

“Librarian avatars were popping up all over the blogs,” said Blowers, who keeps track of developments on her blog.

Although her original goals for Learning 2.0 were touchy-feely “E’s” — exposing staff to new tools, encouraging play, empowering individuals, expanding the knowledge toolbox, eliminating fear — the effects were both practical and financial.

“We don’t have to wait for some training company to come along and say, ‘For $20,000 we’ll show you how this stuff works,’” said Michael Stephens, who wrote Web 2.0 and Libraries: Best Practices for Social Software. “Helene put it on the web so anyone can use that program.”

Libraries all over the world are doing just that — moving the entire Learning 2.0 program to their own websites. The program has been duplicated by university and community library systems in Sweden, Australia, Canada and Denmark. In the United States, programs are underway in South Carolina, Florida, Maryland and California. Even the Combined Arms Research Library, a military repository, is trying it.

Now Blowers’ program is spreading beyond libraries (even virtual ones, like the teen library in Second Life). A public relations firm wants to set up a Learning 2.0 program for its staff, and several universities and an elementary school want to use the system to educate teachers, she said.

Michael Casey, division director of technology services for the Gwinnett County Public Library in Georgia, calls this movement Library 2.0.

“For libraries, the service aspect makes it as akin to Business 2.0 as to Web 2.0,” said Casey, who writes LibraryCrunch. “The 2.0 technology makes it possible to offer a lot without all the licensing and maintenance. It’s all free, it’s browser-based — it’s a technician’s dream.”

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