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 Uncategorized ple michelmarting