Reflections on a Personal Learning Environment

Abstract

The 'personal learning environment' or PLE is a fashionable, though somewhat mercurial, concept. What started out as a re-imagining of elearning along Web 2.0 lines in a way that would empower learners, has for some become a 'Facebook for institutions'. Learner empowerment through the application of two key Web 2.0 principles, 'invent nothing' and 'small pieces loosely joined', appears to be more relevant than building another monolithic institutional application for a variety of reasons. Among the more important of these are: the opportunity to integrate competencies from outside of traditional education into a cohesive learning environment; mediating the inter and extra institutional boundaries or broadening learning activity into extra institutional communities of practice; promoting choice, flexibility and personalisation for learners, broadening tool selection, and integrating user owned technology effectively into learning. Appealing though this concept is, it is easy to get overcome with technological excitement, misplacing the pedagogic context. Learners may erect significant boundaries between learning and social space, and may well not conceptualise their online activities in a way that is easily re-aggregated into a personal learning environment. In addition, the technological, and socio-technical, barriers to such aggregation can easily be underestimated. We present both the outline of a pedagogy for learning 2.0, and a case study of a learning 2.0 project in practice, showing how the project was experienced, and how some of the challenges were overcome. This is relevant to researchers considering the PLE concept, and to practitioners who are looking to exploit social software in learning and teaching.

Introduction and Background

The growing popularity of 'social' software services on the web ('Web 2.0') and the commodification of computer hardware calls into question the monolithic, institutional virtual learning environment. Siemens proposes 'connectivism' as a theory of learning for the digital age arguing that technological change, particularly network or connected technology, means that we "derive our competence from forming connections" (Siemens 2004).
Siemens' insights have been influential in shaping thinking about elearning. Although the modern VLE is a network application - typically a web application - it is, in effect, an analogue of an institution: a set of virtual lessons, inside virtual classrooms, circumscribed by the boundary of the environment itself. Where connections take place, they are in the form of hyperlinks or, of late, RSS feeds. This model has its roots in a time when computers and networks were something found only in large businesses or academic institutions. Learners today arrive at institutions with an extensive online life, and tools at hand (for example, a mobile phone) to engage online at will. Under these circumstances, the enterprise barrier of the VLE appears to be an arbitrary one.
Roughly coeval with Siemens' insights has been the development of 'personalisation' in connection with learning and learning technology (Green et al 2005). Personalisation is defined as
"[A]n approach which advocates reversing the logic of education systems so that the system conforms to the learner, rather than the learner to the system, offering bespoke support for each individual in order to foster engaged and independent learners able to reach their full potential." (Futurelab 2008)
We can see that personalisation and connectivism are in some senses cognate.
Our institution, Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication, is a vocationally based specialist institution serving the needs of the creative industries of Design and Communication. These industries are undergoing disruptive transformation from the effects of new technology. In design, new technology has created entire new areas of creative activity with their own aesthetics and formal practices (for example, web design) as well as transforming existing creative practices through the application of digital tools (for example, CAD, digital photography). In communication, incumbent broadcasters are being challenged by Internet based distribution, whether through peer-to-peer file sharing or new business models, as well as losing ground to entirely new media such as computer games.
Recent developments have brought about social media and 'user-generated content'. In some creative sectors, user generated and social media is not a new phenomenon. For example, the popular music industry experienced a creative renewal in the 1980s as non-traditional artists adopted new technologies to create and disseminate new genres (such as hip-hop), initially circumventing the traditional production and distribution networks of the industry. The growth of personal computing has spawned a series of alternative, or outsider art traditions in graphic and interactive design (for example, photo-manipulation and theming communities). It is however, a confluence of low-cost, high-powered computing, and commodity broadband networks, that has enabled a widespread, and widely viewed, user-generated alternative to massified visual culture to emerge. From the perspective of the incumbents, this emergence has been rapid, and the mainstream creative industries are still reconfiguring themselves around it.
All these currents - connectivism, personalisation, user-generated content and the democratisation of creativity - inform thinking about personal learning environments, or PLEs. Considered in the abstract, a PLE would embody a connected, social, user centred, and user-generated learning environment. It would recognise that learning was not something that existed solely within the walls of an institution and was an experience that was differentiated for each learner.
In the context of user owned technology, a personal learning environment can be viewed as the learner's selection of information flows (Wilson 2007) - websites visited, bookmarks saved, instant-messaging chats, emails, RSS feeds subscribed to, social sharing services used, and searches made. It is possible to imagine 'tooling' this in some way. In fact, the market supplies a fair chunk of the tooling; an extensible web browser like Firefox, with a few extensions, might actually be a personal learning environment.
It is unlikely that anyone but the technology enthusiast is able to assemble a coherent 'environment' from commodity resources. In fact, even the tech savvy are probably not so organised that they structure their activities around an axis of online tools. Nevertheless, it seems that tooling is an all too human response to solving a problem. Typically, learning technologists will create a 'model' of learner (or practitioner) behaviour, then devise tools to address the model. Whilst it is quite possible to model personalisation, it is often tempting to simplify when building a model. A typical PLE simplified model of learning focuses on consolidating and making information flows meaningful to the learner, and largely disregards quality assurance and assessment in the learning process (both of which become complicated as learning activity is personalised, since assessment would have to roam over a broad learning space, and quality assurance would have to track a set of disparate, and difficult to track, activities)¹. In addition, tooling the model assumes tool-users conform to the model's expectation: that they will go with the flow of the machine. The presupposition is understandable and acceptable in the domain of what Andrew McAfee describes as enterprise IT - where centrally directed IT is essentially imposed on its users in the name of institutional benefit (McAfee 2006). However, imposing a workflow makes less sense in the context of user owned or user selected technology, where re-tooling may well be a step the learner is not prepared to undertake. It is against this background that some institutions have "solved" the PLE by creating a Facebook clone "inside the firewall": not personalisation at all, but a reinvention of the VLE as social software.

Case Study - Ravensbourne Learner Integration (LIN-R)

The overall aim of Learner Integration, an ongoing, JISC supported, project is to understand better how Ravensbourne can adapt to and apply the emerging techniques and paradigms of social networking and Web 2.0 applications in implementing a PLE model. The particular focus is to facilitate the integration of institutional systems with the socio-technical landscape of student and staff engagement with the online world. This is being explored through developing, implementing and evaluating the use of student owned technology in support of Personal and Professional Development Planning (PPD). In this we are also identifying and applying methods to support learners' development in a more systematic and personalised way that encourages them to increasingly reflect upon and integrate their learning in relation to their own developing identity and direction. This is being put into practice by developing a framework for students to develop online profiles. These are designed to progressively record the development of their work and working process, to reflect on this and to share and contextualise this with peers, staff and wider communities.
PPD encourages students to recognise and participate in, communities of practice that will form a crucial part of their professional lives. It is therefore important to support them in making effective use of digital technologies that are an increasingly important part of engaging in those communities. Students are encouraged to take responsibility for being both an information consumer, and an information producer and to acquire skills, which will equip them for this. Learners are encouraged to develop their identity and reputation as an extension of the process of critical self-reflection. At more advanced levels learners publicise and develop their work by placing themselves and their ideas and projects within wider contexts and discourses.
We regard the learners' perceptions of the contexts of their learning as a critical factor. We are aiming to develop a continuum from recording development privately, through to representing and sharing this with others- from peers and staff to wider communities- and then also doing this as part of the process of (increasingly professional) collaboration. This has led us to adapt the idea of a PLE as part of a learning design that encourages the integration of different areas and processes of a learner's experience. For us this means integrating processes and activities that are often seen as conflicting, notably reflection with self-representation with assessment.
This suggests that the role of our institution may be increasingly to provide numerous ways for our students to access and make meaningful use of the learning opportunities that we offer as well as to recognise and support students in using extra institutional tools and services to access and synthesise this learning; further to offer increasing opportunities for them to represent this using these tools and for this to be less constructed as a separate or academic activity but rather one that is part of their ongoing collaboration and engagement in communities of practice. We are implementing our overall learning design principally with all level 2 BA courses. At level 2 students are moving from reflecting on their goals and carrying out research and self evaluation to forming a sense of their identity and working practices as professionals.
Implementation has involved adapting our delivery methods and content, our support and submission methods but not at this stage the validated PPD unit itself. This has included delivering sessions on the use of the institutional wiki to build up online profiles and for reflection and evidencing students' work. These have been linked to sessions about reputation building and online culture, communities, and resources and have been further supported by the development of guides and templates mainly on the wiki and linked into our VLE, Moodle.
These decisions about implementation involved a detailed process of considering and relating several areas, all in relation to the pedagogical aims of the project. The areas considered included: tools, learning outcomes, possible delivery methods and different formats for submission, course and student needs. Some of these are described more fully below. The result is that students have been given more flexibility in submission methods without changing the learning outcomes or assessment criteria. Specifically the students have been encouraged to move from submitting via a template document to developing an online profile which contains the same elements but is more outward facing. This supports students in preparing for and seeking work placement opportunities and where possible has also been linked to collaborative projects.
We are using the enterprise wiki Confluence as an aggregation platform. To some extent this is dangerously close to what might be described as the institutional PLE - that is, a social networking platform that is managed and regulated by an academic institution. We do not view the institutional PLE as a desirable goal of a personal learning environment project, however we face significant pedagogical issues in scaffolding collaboration in what can be a radically personalised environment. It is a tendency of creative education to promote an individual-as-artist model of creativity. Unfortunately, this model is reinforced both through general media and culture, and through the Bauhaus derived training of art and design Foundation courses. It is common enough in 'netgen' rhetoric to claim that today's learners are more natural collaborators and co-workers. In fact, we find little practical evidence to support this. If anything, the public performance aspects of social software can reinforce the artist model.
We believe that a wiki is a good platform to explore computer-mediated collaborative knowledge production. It is worthwhile introducing learners to wikis because they are an increasingly widely used collaboration platform. Learners are able to build custom wiki presences quickly, without knowledge of HTML or the intricacies of web design. In many ways a wiki presents a familiar interface, and we are able to leverage a learner's experience of extra institutional social software. At the same time, wikis are far less directed than is common for social software, and therefore less bounded. This creates more opportunities for learning and for creative expression.
In common with many well-developed wiki platforms, Confluence offers simple macros for encapsulating relatively advanced features (such as embedding RSS feeds, Flickr photostreams, or creating photo-galleries or podcasts). Confluence doesn't bury content - it is possible to create arbitrary RSS feeds for content one is interested in, and Confluence supports the Metaweblog API for publishing updates. An important feature of Confluence in the context of this project is that it automatically creates 'personal wikis' for registered users. A personal wiki is a wiki space that is entirely under the user's control. The user is an administrator of their own space, and can adjust visual identity, look and feel, access permissions, and metadata as they see fit. Users therefore have both a space to learn, and a mechanism for exploring and mediating the private-public boundary.
Whilst the PLE remains something of an idealistic vision, it is reasonable to imagine that learners' experience of technology is converging on something very much like this. It is important for institutions to instrument their learning platforms to fit into a PLE world. Confluence is well suited to this: RSS out, MetaWeblog in, an intermediate point of aggregation of a learner's online presence, and a platform that facilitates co-working and collaboration. It may prove to be an intermediate, or transitional, platform, as learners (with the guidance of practitioners) develop their own practice with their own learning aggregators. At this point, a wiki might continue to be a useful platform for institutional knowledge- and content-management.

Reflections and Issues

The engagement of students has been varied to this point. Some have engaged with the learning outcomes and are using the tools in ways that are encouraging and that represent an initial validation of some of the principles of the learning design. Others have engaged less fully in one or more aspects and this highlights the need to continually review the implementation and model. A particularly significant issue has been the perceptions of students, often supported by staff and arguably re-enforced by the current learning context. Our students tend to view technology as a set of tools to support their design or production process and not to support them in learning or developing collaborative practice. Also there is a tendency for many to see the Internet as useful for showcasing their best work - especially towards the end of their degree - but not so much for collaborating on or reflecting on the development of work or working practices. For example where students were using their PPD work to help them to get work placements, the desire to show only their most polished work tended in some cases to limit their willingness to engage in deeper reflection or to represent their working process. On the other hand this connection motivated students to put considerable effort into their work.
We had recognised that private reflection and public or professional representation are often considered as separate activities rather than being seen a continuum, however we underestimated how embedded this dichotomy can be. We similarly underestimated the tenacity of some of the working practices and perceptions - particularly related to studio practice --that limit students from engaging fully with external communities of practice. This highlighted the need for the overall aims of the learning design to be more transparent to learners and staff and embedded in the unit and the course as a whole. We are considering how to introduce models and tools earlier into the unit and how to embed them in more transparent ways into the learning design, assessment practices and learning context.
A more general conclusion is that in the process of applying new and innovative learning design it is often the case that newer concepts are initially introduced as prescriptions or guides before they can be fully built into the design itself. This is especially true where assumptions about learner and staff perceptions can only be fully understood through implementation. Above all we recognise that the values associated with Web 2.0 and social software will take longer to embed than the use of specific tools, although the two are clearly related. This is an issue that involves working further with learners, staff and the institution.
We have come to recognise that the sophistication of student engagement with social software and Web 2.0 tools can be overestimated; for example very few of our students have used any form of aggregation (we are exploring how to encourage and scaffold this and link it to learning as part of our PLE concept). Their awareness of the value and uses of social software - for anything beyond social interaction - and their ideas about managing an online identity are at least initially, limited. It seems that there is an overlap between the level of independence and maturity of learners and their approach to using technology and engaging with communities of practice. This highlights again the need to scaffold this process for students.
Although we can conceptualise the PLE as the sum total of feeds and flows that a learner aggregates - perhaps using a desktop aggregator like NetNewsWire, or a web based aggregator like Google Reader, or, in a less-sophisticated example, simply the collection of 'stuff' on the learner's laptop - in practice, learners do not do this, and there is an absence of user friendly tools to help learners build their own PLE.
For teaching staff, grappling with technology can be the biggest problem. Whilst Web 2.0 exists in the magical realm of imagination, its possibilities for creative transformation are limitless. Once it collides with hard, reality, it becomes another frustrating piece of the software landscape, full of unexpected misfeatures and blue screens of death, plagued by incompatibilities or out of date plugins. More adventurous academics may find themselves painfully recapitulating the hard lessons of elearning. For example, some of the more obvious platforms to experiment with - Facebook and YouTube - are difficult to integrate, and managing an exit to more PLE-friendly platforms (BBM, Blip), tricky. Often, the practitioner is not aware that there are alternative platforms.
The move to a PLE model is pedagogically desirable for many reasons, including the ways in which it can encourage more learner centered, personalised, and integrated life long learning because, it exists outside of the VLE panopticon. It also presents considerable challenges to current practice, significantly assessment. One such challenge is the problem of scale. In a standardised, centralised environment such as a VLE an assessor only has to go to one place. Learners need only upload assignments in a prescribed format to a prescribed location. The affordances of network IT include loose coupling and the 'mashup' but these are not universal values in services on the wider web, neither are they necessarily within the grasp of non-technical users. We have encountered smaller scale but related issues in trying to balance the desire to allow students to submit work in formats and using tools that fit with their practice or prescribing formats that fit the needs of the institution and assessors. We have also needed to consider how any solutions that we identify can be scalable and sustainable beyond the life of the project.
In the same way that a learner might build up a set of learning activities and knowledge sources from a range of intra and extra institutional resources and consolidate them in a learning aggregator, so might they create the outputs of their learning activities in a diverse range of extra-institutional systems, with the final output instantiated perhaps in the pedagogue's aggregator, or as the inputs of a mashup. This presents a significant problem of scale. Not only does the practitioner have to (be able to) subscribe to the learner's content (or worse, visit walled gardens), they must make sense of the presentation of the content, and the relative difficulty behind its construction in order to assess it successfully. It is improbable that a practitioner will have the necessary capabilities, let alone the time, to synthesise and normalise all the outputs of learners.
In general we would argue that institutions trade off personalisation for scalability. A lecture might not be the most pedagogically sound way of 'doing learning', but it is potentially massively scalable - as well as the physical lecture, one can imagine a live stream and podcasts for download. That a massified lecture could only deal with a minute amount of interaction is actually in the interests of scale - it is precisely by minimising interaction that scalability becomes possible. Giving the responsibility for managing their learning to learners is an attempt to combine personalisation with scalability. The learning experience is personal to the learner, because the learner creates it. But the practitioner doesn't have to create a personal learning experience for each learner, because the practitioner's input forms only a fragment of the learner's learning network. We can presuppose that if the practitioner creates subscribable objects that they are URL addressable at a granular level of addressability.
From our initial experience we doubt that contemporary learners are sophisticated enough in their use of technology to naturally come up with learning by mashup; it is possible that the growing popularity of user-generated content may encourage such a culture, however it may be that an increasingly oppressive mainstream IPR regime will activity discourage synthetic bricolage. Nevertheless, we think it is useful in practice based creative education to invite learners to consider bricolage as a useful tool both for learning per se, and as a means to creatively engage with the online world. Whilst we expect growing independence over time, at present we are using a wiki as a container for learners' aggregation. Scaffolding student's learning activities using a common platform is amenable to normal delivery techniques but allows for developing sophistication.
A model that we have found useful in articulating how a diverse range of inputs can be aggregated into meaningful learning experience is 'the social stack' that was proposed by Lee Bryant of Headshift Ltd. This model provides some consistency for and systematisation of the web as an information resource, without becoming over-burdened with synthetic content creation (mashups) - which latter is conceptually beyond the level of experience of many learners and practitioners. 'The social stack' moves from the flow of information, through attention, discussion, collaboration, to personal organisation. As such, it is a useful device for making explicit a workflow that synthesises information from the broad sea of the web. The model is tool- neutral, because it describes the kind of activities one might carry out, rather than prescribing the tools that one would need. Learners and practitioners can gain insight into their tool use rather than revise their tool chains. We have produced a tool selection and comparison guide that is aligned to social stack slices. Whilst it is a useful scaffold, without the panopticon of the VLE, it is difficult to see how students are doing. One of the practical advantages of exploring these themes within a wiki is that a learner's activities are made visible.
Through this and a previous JISC supported project, Designs on Learning (DoL) the application of social software for learning, and the interconnection with extra-institutional communities of practice, has become an important dynamic at the College. The current project is moving us towards a coherent pedagogy that incorporates these technologies into a meaningful narrative of creative production. Whilst this remains a challenge for the institution, it also remains a challenge for the creative industries that the institution serves.

References

Futurelab. 2008. [online]. [Accessed 30^th May 2008]. Available from World Wide Web: http://www.futurelab.org.uk/glossary#personalisation
Green, H., Facer, K., Rudd, R, Dillon, P. & Humphreys, P. (2005) Personalisation and Digital Technologies [online]. [Accessed 30^th May 2008]. Available from World Wide Web: http://www.futurelab.org.uk/resources/publications_reports_articles/opening_education_reports/Opening_Education_Report201
McAfee, A. (2006) Three Technologies, Three Opportunities: A Framework for IT Leadership. 20 March 2006. The Impact of Information Technology (IT) on Businesses and Their Leaders [online]. [Accessed 30 May 2007]. Available from World Wide Web:
<http://blog.hbs.edu/faculty/amcafee/index.php/faculty_amcafee_v3/three_technologies_three_opportunities_a_framework_for_it_leadership/>
Siemens, G. (2004) Connectivism: A learning Theory for the Digital Age [online]. [Accessed 30^th May 2008]. Available from World Wide Web: <http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm>
Wilson, S. (2007) Using Student-owned Technologies in Educational ICT [online]. [Accessed 30^th May 20080. Available from World Wide Web: http://www.edusite.nl/edusite/columns/17465
¹ It is possible to imagine ways of simplifying the assessment and quality assurance problems, and there are tools that might support this. Institutionally provided OpenID identities could provide a way of tracing interaction with extra-institutional services, and technologies built on OpenSocial could provide a basis for integrating disparate services. Once more, these are tool-led solutions.

Biographies

Ruth Catlow is Associate Senior Lecturer in Digital Media at Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication. She is a member of the Learning Enhancement team and is working as part of a team on two JISC projects: 'Designs on Learning' and 'Learner Integration'. She is co-founder of Furtherfield.org an online platform and community for networked media art and of HTTP Gallery in North London.
Miles Metcalfe is the head of IT Research and Development at Ravensbourne College. He is involved in several JISC-funded projects exploring themes such as the impact of user owned technology on institutional technical infrastructure.
Roger Rees is Head of Learning Enhancement and PPD at Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication. He has many years of experience of lecturing and learning design, particularly in practice based further and higher education, emphasising student centred and innovative approaches.