Personal Learning Environments

Origins of PLEs

Origins of the PLE concept can be traced back to research in artificial intelligence as early as 1976 and computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) in the 1980s and 1990s. In the 21st century, PLEs have been steadily gaining ground as an effective platform for student learning and have been described by scholars such as Brigid Barron, Stephen Downes, Tom Haskins, Scott Wilson, and Mark van Harmelen as individual educational platforms, self-initiated and interest-driven learning environments, unique creations of individual learners that help shape their knowledge and understandings, self-directed learning systems, and methods and tools that help students organize and self-manage their learning.

PLEs and Personalization

PLEs are increasingly addressing issues of learner control and personalization that are often absent in the institutional learning management system or LMS. The LMS is controlled by the institution’s faculty and administrators leaving little room for students to create, manage, and maintain a personalized learning space that supports their own learning activities as well as connections to peers and social networks across time and place. In a PLE, the locus of control shifts away from the institution to individual students, helping them take control of their own learning and build a personal cyberinfrastructure and learning ecosystem that extends learning beyond the boundaries of the classroom, institution, or organization, using distributed and portable tools. In a PLE, the student chooses the tools that match his or her personal learning style and pace, and the student decides how to organize and manage the content to learn effectively and efficiently, hence, PLEs are individualized by design. Specifically, PLEs are built bottom up, starting with personal goals, information management, and individual knowledge construction, and progressing to socially mediated knowledge and networked learning. Consequently, PLEs can be perceived as a single student’s educational or e-learning platform, allowing collaboration with other students and instructors and coordination of such interactions across a wide range of systems and learning communities.

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