Below you can find the original text of the interview in Spanish, and a quick translation into English.

Interview (by Lola Torres):
Peña-López, I. (2012). Personal Learning Environments. Interview for Digitalingua 2012.

What do you mean by PLE?

Although certainly not the best way to define a thing, I like to
think on the Personal Learning Environment as opposed to two aspects of learning, which are, still today, the orthodox and hegemonic form to understand education (and note the change of “learning” to “education” is fully conscious).

When we think of learning we tend to circumscribe it into a formal and institutional environment. Formal in the sense that one “sets” oneself to learn, at a specific time and place, at a stage of life intended for it, and with a more or less defined plan (goals, methodology, schedule). Institutional in the sense that all this is provided in an exogenous way, by an institution (teacher, school, university, academia) that is who determines all aspects of formal learning, which is why we have to move from learning to being taught or educated.

The Personal Learning Environment is rethinking the whole process of learning from the informal and the endogenous or non-institutional, everyone becoming responsible for their own learning plan. And this is largely possible by the digital revolution: the knowledge contained in people and objects is
now available to anyone, anywhere, anytime. So, I understand the PLE as a set of conscious strategies to use technological tools to access the knowledge contained in objects and people and thereby achieve certain learning goals.

Could you explain your PLE as a teacher and as a researcher?

For me it is essential to consider research and teaching as two
sides of the same coin, the coin of knowledge. In this sense, research is but learning, and teaching is but learning
backwards. Thus, there is not a PLE for teaching and another one for research, but there is a PLE that sometimes works in one direction and sometimes in the other one.

And the very same consideration applies, in my opinion, for the PLE of a student. In the same train of thought of considering the PLE as a learning strategy in an open environment enabled by technology, I think is increasingly difficult to argue that the student must always be placed at the end where one only receives knowledge: the PLE puts the person, the learner, in the centre of a mesh whose purpose is that knowledge flows from one node to another one.

In this sense, I do not think there are different PLEs for teachers/researchers or students, but all of them are nodes of the same mesh. It will just happen that in some topics some nodes in that mesh will be denser than others, or that knowledge flows more fluently in some directions than others, but it will be a matter of
flows (thus temporary) rather than of architectures (or structural).

That said, my PLE responds to a simple conceptual framework:

• What sources of knowledge do I feed from.
• Who do I say that I am, although the sources that one feed from also make up much of the public person that sits in the centre of my PLE.
• What I create, which is merely the result of certain knowledge sources transiting through me, producing a new point of view, a gathering of knowledges previously isolated or, at best, a small addition to the original set of knowledges.

What challenge is education-teachers, universities, institutions
education, compared to PLE?

From the moment that we are talking about teachers vs. students, about institutions vs. individuals, about learning vs. leisure, we are creating a series of dichotomies which necessarily place those terms in opposition. But the PLE, if we stick to its definition as a mesh of people and objects oriented towards learning, cannot be conceived as a set of dichotomies or elements placed in opposition.

To consider that the PLE is a good learning tool is to assume,
implicitly, that there has been a radical change in the sociocultural and economic context and that this makes the PLE possible. So, the biggest challenge of Education is to carry on an extraordinary reflection about many things that we now take for granted and, if we end up assuming that the context has changed, it is also possible that the very same foundations of that we call education may also have changed.

Thus, PLEs do not present a challenge in themselves: I believe that PLEs are a symptom of a deep systemic change that goes beyond education. And that systemic change is the real challenge. Digitization challenges basic concepts in Education. Digital content — reproducible, storable and transferable at lowest cost — make irrelevant many of the functions of documentation centres as silos of books. Telecommunications — fast, cheap and ubiquitous — make also irrelevant schools as hubs of talent. And the concentration of content and talent is the foundation of schools, universities, research centres and libraries.

PLEs are proof that some features of the current institutions can be carried on ​​by other “institutions”, and that there is a need to rethink what new role in society should have the former ones.

What advice would you give to a language teacher to start your PLE?

Although this reflection is ex-post, it has helped me — and still does — to identify four stages in the use of a methodology or a technology in setting up my own PLE.

In a first stage, appropriation, one has to know what methods or what technologies exist, what skills should be apprehended to get the best of them, and what are their pros and cons. In this respect, staying up to date of what exists and how people use it is to me a first elemental approach. All in all, it is about initiating the learning process beginning with methods and tools, the same way we know how to locate the nearest library or instruct ourselves in the use of files for our working notes.

The second step is to adopt the methodology or the technology. This step consists in replacing a methodology or technology in a task that we already performed, with the only purpose of replacement of one technology by another one. Even if it might seem absurd to have invested resources to end up remaining in the same place, this phase will help us in answering the following question: to identify “why” or “what for” will I use the PLE, a crucial question that cannot have a void answer. Some people will then begin to manage the sources of information with an RSS feed reader, something that one quickly gets used to by the utility that
it provides. Others will start to sort their bibliographic resources. Others will replace paper notes with a blog or a wiki, always handy, sorted and enabling queries. Others will publish digital files that they had already produced, in various Internet services to increase their outreach.

Once the first the phases of appropriation and adoption are over, it is then time to improve our learning processes, to make it more effective and/or more efficient. This is often the most rewarding part, as it is when the investment we made in time and effort starts to make sense. If we start with something
easy and something where the impact will be greater, the relative returns will be higher. Following the previous examples, reading information sources can be accompanied by storing what may seem more relevant to us or sharing it on social networking sites to enrich the debate and help in building a network. Or if we publish our notes in a blog we can try and embed our slides, using the most relevant tags, accompanying the slides in our blog with references that we retrieved from our bibliographic manager.

Finally, beyond the improvement of processes, the last phase consists in radically transform these processes. A transformation — if notthe transformation — is to “think digital”. That is, for instance, other than taking notes and copying them to the blog, taking instead the laptop to a talk and liveblog the talk while, at the same time, tweeting the event. What once was an individual and private act becomes now a collective and public act.

And it is in this transformation of the private sphere where we transform the whole system, breaking the personal dichotomies to be able to rethink education as a whole.

The story begins in 2001, when I began working in the department of development cooperation in my university, developing ICT4D projects based on e-learning for development, online volunteering, free software and open content… when very few people spoke about that and in these terms.

The need to learn led me to explore outside of my closest environment, read blogs (which were then the most up-to-date resource available) and, finally, start my own blog in 2003. Then it came the wiki, then the bibliographic manager, then I turned a PhD student and I finally became a lecturer at university, where I try to apply the way I learnt to learn to the way I teach and help others to learn.

Takeaways:

• Read a lot. If you’re a knowledge worker, you have to read. If you don’t, the problem is not that the PLE is time-demanding: the problem is that you’re not doing your work.
• Read thoroughly: analysis, synthesis, abstraction are a requisite for juicing a reading. Quite often reading requires writing to fix the main ideas and your own reflections triggered by them.
• The best way to learn is to teach something. Writing (a blog) is partly about this: you are writing for the future you that will be reading your own words later on.
• A PLE is not build out of the blue: do it little by little, device after device. You’d rarely use an all-tools PLE, as you’ll rarely get a definitive one.
• Building a PLE should be done according to the needs it will cover. A PLE should be working for you, not the other way round.
• Your digital identity is very important and it will become more important with time. Be proactive in building it. And your own domain is a good place to start with.
• Your portfolio speaks about you better than your words. And it does it 24×7. It is very likely that, for most knowledge-based jobs, your e-portfolio will be worth much more than your resume.
• Your network of people is as important as the objects you surround yourself with. Birds of the same feathers flock together: your network is your flesh & bones e-portfolio.
• In a digital world, everything is connected.
• Thus, inside/outside is a false dichotomy, artificially created to raise walls were there were none. Ask yourself why someone would try and build such walls.

Downloads

• Slides in Catalan (, 838KB)
• Slides in English (, 797KB)

NOTE: My gratitude to Enric Serra and the organization for a most enjoyable time at the conference.

Underlying beneath many of these concepts was the ever-present concept of multitasking, most of the times understood in a negative way: too distracting, shallow in its use of information, etc. While I agree that multitasking can definitely be a problem, I am not sure that we are talking here about multitasking or task-switching. And, if this about task-switching, whether we are talking about beginning everything and not finishing anything, or about yet another thing.

I believe that there is an increasing set of learners that are heavy switchers that do not actually hop from task to task, but that understand the process of learning as a trip through different learning objects, and not as staying bound to a single learning space. As some industries do by having some piece of work done in a succession of countries, same happens with some learners learning through a succession of learning objects and, by doing so, going in and out formal education.

What is informal learning?

Mark K. Smith has collected an interesting bibliography around the topic for his Informal Learning article at The Encyclopaedia of Informal Education, but I’d rather choose the short, straightforward and clear definitions by Jenny Hughes in Defining Learning.

Nevertheless, it is my opinion that most definitions are too much focussed on the context (how) and not on the nature (what) of formal, informal or non-formal learning. Following the idea that Jenny Hughes points at about structured vs. unstructured learning, I suggest to speak about planned vs. just-in-time learning, and goal-set vs. serendipitous learning. The relationship, concepts and examples are pictured in the following image:

Degrees of formality in education according to goals and planning [click to enlarge]

According to the planned/just-in-time and goal-set/serendipitous axes, we find four categories of learning:

• Formal: Planned and curriculum-based learning, like the one that usually happens at school.
• Non-formal: Planned but less structured learning than formal learning. It will usually take place in formal spaces, but with a less tight framework.
• Informal: Like non-formal, it has no structured goals, but it happens outside of formal institutions, like the workspace.
• Self-taught/autodidactic: Also focussed at achieving some specific goals, but more short-term- and competence-aimed instead of long-term- or generic-knowledge-aimed.

Of course this categories have blurry edges and they are more a guide, a conceptual framework rather than a faithful depiction of what takes place in reality.

But what is interesting about this categorization is not its definition in itself, but how the different categories “interact” with concepts like the syllabus, the Personal Learning Environment (PLE) and the different kinds of existing “learning objects”, which we group into formal (e.g. the usual textbook), open (e.g. a piece of formal opencourseware) and informal (e.g. a blog post).

The following image presents five types of learning (the preceding four plus open formal learning, which is formal learning that uses open content). Blue pieces indicate formal learning objects, green ones open and red ones informal.

From formal learning to open social learning through translearning [click to enlarge]

We can see that there is a normal transition from formal content through open content to informal content as long as we move from formal education to informal education. This is how things have always been.

The existence of open (formal) content brings in a new scenario, where this content can be both used inside the classroom (formal education) and outside of it (informal learning).

I would like to witness, in a not-very-far future, two more scenarios.

Translearning

The first one, here labelled as translearning, would include not only open content in the classroom, but also acknowledging that informal learning is possible on a formal environment. Credit recognition is a first way to do so, but being those credits not from e.g. other universities but from informal learning such as work experience.

The rational behind the “trans-” part of the name is that Information and Communication Technologies have made possible what trucks, trains, planes and ships made possible in an industrial society. Still in many industrial sectors, multinational corporations are but performing transnational commerce: cotton is collected in one country, weaved in another one, cut and sewed in a third one and sold in a last fourth one.

Translearning is just about that: the learner begins in the classroom, at their handbook table of contents, then shifts to an informal environment, then to some open content and at last back to their classroom for final assessment (the scheme and its order can grow as complex as you’d like).

The good thing about translearning is its openness beyond the classroom’s and the syllabus’s boundaries. The bad thing about it is, still, structure, planning.

The PLE in translearning is a heavily monitored, piloted, top-down driven one, even a Hybrid Institutional-Personal Learning Environment (HIPLE).

Open Social Learning

A next step towards a more un-structured scenario is shifting from translearning to (fully) open social learning. In this scenario, a sort of syllabus can be agreed, but the inner structure is totally free. The learner can actually choose from a wide range of resources that will make up their PLE. Accreditation of what’s learnt can requite — as we saw in translearning — a first and last formal module. But the rest is totally free.

As said, this is where the Personal Learning Environment can really develop its full potential, as it is the learner, self-positioned in their own environment, that has full responsibility of their own learning path.

Now, coming back to where we started. One of the increasingly common complaints from educators is that their students continuously switch tasks, that they attention time-spans are narrowing, that they are bored, that they’d rather work in what they want or, especially, the way they like. On the other hand, learners are increasingly aware — this is even truer in adult learners and/or in informal learners — of the many possibilities they have to reach knowledge, to acquire it, to share it and to improve it by feeding back rich conversations with peers onto their own learning process.

Heavy switching is definitely an issue. And in many cases, an issue that might be solved but directly fighting against it.

Notwithstanding, heavy switching — call it, even, multitasking — might be leveraged to enrich one’s learning process by diversifying or opening up one’s learning path.

More information

• Open EdTech 2010: Campus Life! — A Call to Action (, 101 KB)
• Open EdTech Summit official website.

I am preparing a support material for a conference on Personal Learning Environments due in Barcelona next February 2011. The material is going to be based on a series of writings I recently made on the topic of the Personal Learning Environment and, more specifically, on the Hybrid Institutional Personal Learning Environment as a bridge between educational institutions and online informal/social learning.

That was the perfect excuse to test the possibilities of Anthologize with a practical exercise.

At first sight, Anthologize just saves you some of the old copy-and-paste by making it easier to merge several (WordPress) blog posts into one. After working with it, what it really does is making really easy to engage in a simple but real editorial process, which includes selecting the appropriate articles, make changes in them (without altering the originals!), and seeing how they best fit together by selecting their order or grouping them into sections or chapters. If you’re not happy with the result, the output can be exported to an RTF file which you can afterwords thoroughly edit in any text editor. Simple as it sounds, it’s an awesome and very useful tool for quickly making deliverables out of your blog.

Here’s what came out of my experiment:

Deinstitutionalizaing Education.
Personal Learning Environments:
blurring the edges of formal and informal learning

This final version was deeply edited after the Anthologize process was over. It was, nevertheless, a very personal decision and there was actually not a real need for it but a matter of taste.

This is a three-part article whose aim is to serve as an update to my work on the personal research portal, as long as to explain yet another practical example of a PLE, something that many found useful at the PLE Conference as a means to embody theoretical ramblings.

The first part deals with infrastructures and how my PLE is built in the sense of which applications shape it. The second one deals with the information management workflow. The third one puts the personal learning environment in relationship with the university.

If in the two previous parts we have seen what can the infrastructure of a PLE be like and what can the workflow be, we here will see how the personal fits into the institutional. I agree that PLEs are not just tools but ways to understand learning on the Net, hence the debate around institutional or non-institutional PLEs may seem void. Still, I think this question is indeed relevant because, beyond their learning specificities, I believe in PLEs as a driver of change in formal learning en educational institutions, as a wedge that breaks through the interstices that have opened in the education system.

An introduction to the (new) UOC Campus, a virtual open campus

In the last years, my colleagues at the Office of Learning Technologies (OLT) at the Open University of Catalonia have been doing a terrific job in preparing our virtual campus for openness.

Being part of the faculty and not part of the OLT team, I’m not fully knowledgeable of all the work that has been done there, but I can speak of perceptions, which is most of the times what in the end matters. And the perceptions are that our campus has undergone (at least) two drastic transformations in the recent years from the standpoint of view of the user:

• The Campus project, a multi-stakeholder initiative, changed our virtual campus from a closed legacy system into a service-oriented architecture that now can interact or incorporate most services and applications existing around, from modules from other LMSs (e.g. a Moodle classroom) to the most common web 2.0 applications (e.g. a WordPress blog). These services can be selected (with the required profile permissions) and set up into a classroom at will. New services and apps take from one to two semesters to be added to the current pool of options, depending on complexity.
• The MyUOC project provided each and every university member with an “i-Homepage” inside the Campus, the flavour of Netvibes or iGoogle thus allowing for a brand new path towards personalization and external information self-integration (i.e. DIY integration of external information, not top-down led).

Fitting the personal into the institutional

So, what have these changes meant? And, especially, how is that new virtual campus coping with my own PLE?

The following image re-visits the infrastructure of a Personal Learning Environment, simplifies it and puts it in relationship with the infrastructure of UOC’s virtual campus (also greatly simplified).

The interaction of a LMS and a PLE [click to enlarge]

Of the virtual campus (painted in green), I listed several web 2.0 applications currently in use. These are the usual suspects: on-site installations of blogs, wikis, fora, repositories, question tools, etc. Of course you do not always (for several reasons) can or want to install something in the campus. Then, you always have the option to install it in your own web server (i.e. your own personal learning environment or, in this case, your personal teaching environment) and either call it with a link from the virtual classroom. But there are better ways to cross the line that separates the walled garden of the virtual campus from the rest of the cyberworld:

• The MyUOC i-homepage, which now can hold information from third parties. Some of this information is retrieved by using widgets especially adapted to the campus. But potentially all kinds of information, apps and services can be embedded by means of iframes. Simple (and not elegant) as this solution may be, it definitely works and lets any user (i.e. me) to add information without bothering or requiring anyone to code anything. I’m currently using this page to collect in there my academic schedule on a Google Calendar, the dropbox account I use(d) to share huge MSc thesis documents and datasets with an student of mine living in Panama, Google Docs with a collectively edited and authored ongoing book, or the teaching blogs that I installed in my own site but for teaching purposes and to be used by campus students..
• The Wikispaces wiki: unlike your typical Mediawiki or PmWiki installation, which resides in your LMS (we use these too), you can now use a wikispace which lives outside the campus (i.e. at Wikispaces), though it has been wired to the campus so that the user is automatically kept logged in so they do not have to bother whether they are in or outside. Again, simple as this might sound, it does not only enables installing external applications to your campus, but use external services that may not be available for custom install.
• Third, the nanoblogging project (being implemented in the next two semesters in different phases) will bring StatusNet to the classroom in a first phase. So long, no big news: there is, of course, technical stuff to be done, but it is “only” a matter of installing and wiring tools and classrooms. I’m not trivializing this part, but “conceptually”, there’s no big difference with setting up the first blog. Hopefully, though, in a second and third phase, the idea is to bring the nanoblogging timeline to the MyUOC i-homepage and to make possible an interaction with Twitter. If everything goes well (time, resources, etc.), it should very much look like what was described in The Hybrid Institutional-Personal Learning Environment (HIPLE) into practice: an example with Twitter , where the boundaries of the virtual campus are totally overridden.

Back to the Hybrid Institutional-Personal Learning Environment

At this point, it is necessary to pay back a visit to the concept of the The Hybrid Institutional-Personal Learning Environment (HIPLE). Even if still at a very low level and with a lot of effort invested, the LMS I’ve been mainly using for almost 11 years and the PLE I started almost 7 years ago now speak one to each other. They sometimes speak in smoke signals, they sometimes speak like Italians and Spaniards do (each one in their own language, but more or less understanding each other), but speak they do.

Why is this so important?

It took years to journalists and, especially, to news businessmen to understand that the monopoly of news distribution was over, and that there were news streams outside mass media. Part of the crisis media are living today comes from the late understanding (and negation) of that fact, with consequences in job losses, decreased quantity of quality information, negative effects on democracy… you name it.

While journalism is important, I believe that education is even more important… and much more complex. As it happened with news, learning is increasingly happening “out there”. And if blogs were the main tools of “citizen journalism”, PLEs are becoming the tools of out-there-education.

It is my opinion that all the forecasts about the emergence of life-long-learning, informal learning, social learning, etc. are coming true, but are taking place outside of formal education and its walled institutions. And while educational institutions — and their components, including assessment, accreditation and educators — definitely need a dire transformation, they still play a core role in our society.

And it is precisely here, in bridging what is happening in out-there-education with the important socioeconomic role of educational institutions that PLEs can come to the rescue. As we have just shown, PLEs can permeate the waterproof membranes of educational institutions, the brick walls of classrooms. PLEs as personal research portals (PRP) can turn the academic ivory towers into crystal, enabling peeping the inside… and bringing some external light to its dark matters too.

That is why, in my opinion, PLEs are not only learning tools, not only ways to understand learning on the Net or to understand informal learning. In my opinion, PLEs are transforming drivers with an extraordinary potential for change.

This is a three-part article whose aim is to serve as an update to my work on the personal research portal, as long as to explain yet another practical example of a PLE, something that many found useful at the PLE Conference as a means to embody theoretical ramblings.

The first part deals with infrastructures and how my PLE is built in the sense of which applications shape it. The second one deals with the information management workflow. The third one puts the personal learning environment in relationship with the university.

Mainstreaming your PLE

If in The Workings of a Personal Learning Environment (I): the infrastructure we saw how a PLE could be built, we here explain how can it work. Or, in other words, how the information flows through it and is fixed and transformed.

An observation, though, should be made about the substance and the form of the PLE which, actually, can be translated into two conditions (necessary, not sufficient) for a PLE to be useful to oneself (not talking here about it being “successful” as measured by third parties). If we understand useful as that it serves our purposes in learning more and better, or doing more research and better, then:

• Setting up a PLE means that you really want to learn or do research, and that you’re willing to confront what this means. This basically zeroes in performing the processes of analysis, synthesis, abstraction and critique. That is: read, note, think and write. Many people think that PLEs require a lot of reading or writing. Wrong: it is learning that does.
• Setting up a PLE means that you just built a parallel structure to your usual pencil and paper procedures. Maintaining two channels requires extra work. The more you mainstream and focus in just one platform, the better. I myself found my PLE useful once it became mainstream in the production of my knowledge and network. With rare exceptions (and reducing), everything is on my PLE.

Reading

I would like to make a point before going on with the discussion. While I argue that open publishing (and your PLE fits in this category) should be part of a scholar’s commandments (especially if in a publicly founded university or research centre), I acknowledge that the idea of where to publish (e.g. paper vs. blog) is at least debatable. But concerning reading, I have instead a very strong opinion: RSS feeds let you reach more information and in an easier way. Thus, I have serious doubts whether a knowledge worker can be up-to-date in their discipline and/or be efficient in their information management without the help of an RSS feed reader.

Now, being a scholar, reading is a total priority, even if it sometimes will imply me lagging behind deadlines in other kind of tasks. Of course there are different categories in the things I read, but besides the ones that are strictly personal, reading usually goes first place. So, first things in the morning are e-mail, feed reader and Twitter (some tags and users come in by through the feed reader too) until the morning reading is done or almost done.

The first exercise is to tell things that have to be read “right now” from things that are going to be saved for later. Amongst these, some will be printed or saved in the mp3/mp4 player for the train, or for a quiet moment, and some others will be shifted to the future. In any case, the key thing to do is to read the important things or at least to know what I’ve got pending reading of interest.

Storing

If what I find to be really important, I at least read the abstract+introduction+conclusions and save it on a folder on my hard drive. This is a folder labelled with the main topic (e.g. e-readiness) under a general “readings” folder. This is useful afterwards when writing: you can make Acrobat perform a full text search for a keyword in a whole folder. You don’t have to remind everything: just know you read something about that and that it has to be “somewhere” in those folders.

If the article is read thoroughly, it will go to the bibliographic manager and sometimes even to the blog with a comment or a reflection.

Sometimes what gets to me is not an article, or the article has some extra information worth keeping apart. In that case, the wiki plays its part. For instance, the last edition of Leonard Waverman’s Connectivity Scorecard will be included in my bibliography. Nevertheless, because the datasets have now been made public online, a Connectivity Scorecard entry will be created in the wiki. This is laborious and makes little sense in the short run. In the long run, your list of ICT Indices and ICT Data sources is always up-to-date, you can easily list all the works you’ve read by Leonard Waverman or Kaylan Dasgupta or under the category of e-Readiness or tagged with connectivity scorecard. In the long run, the effort pays back, it far does.

Once you think you’ve more or less scanned a topic, posted about it and created the necessary references, then you can forget about them: you know they’ll be on your blog with the reflections you got at that time and the interlinked references with other works, comments, authors, etc.

I gather information on a double basis:

• things I know 100% I’ll be using, e.g. the World Economic Forum’s Global Information Technology Report 2009-2010, a reference in the field of e-Readiness and digital development.
• things I might use somewhen: politics 2.0, for instance, or e-government. Not sure whether I’ll be using them, but likely, as it normally ends up happening. e.g. Last year I wrote a book chapter on Spanish Politics 2.0. During a year and a half I had een gathering info on that topic “just in case” and storing it in my hard drive, putting the main references in the bibliography and saving the rest “for later”. I knew, when I got the proposal to write the chapter, that whatever I got it had to be there. There was a lot of crap, but enough good references to prepare a fair chapter. “Just in case” also works pretty much well to update syllabuses or to prepare non-academic conferences, as they are full of facts and good examples.

What about delicious? I normally use it just for (a) news or (b) applied practices/examples. In other words: information with expiry-dates or that interest me just to build lists. Delicious is useful for me to quickly share resources that need low elaboration.

So, summing up:

• If I find something that seems really relevant, I scan it and store it the best way possible.
• If I you find something that is just probably relevant, I store it under a “tag” in the hard drive and in a way I can later perform brute force searches without crashing my computer (this procedure is diminishing along time and being substituted by the former one and trashing leftovers).

The following chart plots the references entered in the bibliographic manager since it went online (May 2005). Simple as it is, it shows two things: the first one is that despite some irregularities, the average has always been around the 27 new entries per month, which implies how mainstreamed the tool is with my daily work; the second one is that, besides the long-term regular pace, some months are “better” than others and can be easily identified as (a) periods of preparation of papers/speeches and (b) holidays, often used to “catch up” with pending readings.

References entered in the bibliographic manager [click to enlarge]

Sharing

Some of the sharing can be inferred from the storing, as the whole PLE is open (with just a very very few exceptions).

If we follow the information management timeline, some interesting news are shared through Twitter, either directly (using retweets or bit.ly) or indirectly: my Google Shared account directly sends everything to Twitter and everything that goes to delicious is made public at the moment.

As can be seen in the image image in The Workings of a Personal Learning Environment (I): the infrastructure, the lifestream or aggregator and FriendFeed collect all the activity from the several applications and services I use (blogs, updates to the wiki and the bibliographic manager, Slideshare, Youtube… not Prezi), being the main difference that FriendFeed gathers “social” information (Facebook, Linkedin, Dopplr) that the aggregator does not.

Talking of which: I still have to find a return for Dopplr and Google Calendar. I think they give a sense of presence (of “realness”) worth keeping. Besides, Google Calendar holds right now three calendars: one gathers the public events I attend; a second one is my teaching schedule (more about this in the third part: The Workings of a Personal Learning Environment: the institutional fit); the third one is the ICT4D Calendar, a collaborative project and an easy way to keep track of ICT4D conferences while also letting others know about them. I’m pretty sure the latter is the most important as, within its limited success, it is a good trial on decentralized collaboration.

Keep reading: The Workings of a Personal Learning Environment (III): the institutional fit.

This is a three-part article whose aim is to serve as an update to my work on the personal research portal, as long as to explain yet another practical example of a PLE, something that many found useful at the PLE Conference as a means to embody theoretical ramblings.

The first part deals with infrastructures and how my PLE is built in the sense of which applications shape it. The second one deals with the information management workflow. The third one puts the personal learning environment in relationship with the university.

A PLE digression

During the Spring of 2007 I wrote an article, The personal research portal: web 2.0 driven individual commitment with open access for development in which I proposed the concept of the Personal Research Portal as a means to create a digital identity for the researcher — tied to his digital public notebook and personal repository — and a virtual network of colleagues working in the same field.

Later that year, in summer, I attended the Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Programme at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. It was for me — and for most in there — the first truly web 2.0 enhanced event (as I put it in OII SDP 2007 (Epilogue): Last thoughts about Web Science and Academic Blogging or Why did not Academia came up with Wikipedia), as it was a fantastic exercise to stress the potential of blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, open bibliographic managers or photo and video sharing websites for knowledge sharing and building; and the (personal) discovery of then emerging tools like Twitter, Facebook and Dopplr.

The academic course ended up with the publication of Personal Learning Environments: Challenging the dominant design of educational systems, where, finally, Scott Wilson et al. formally put together what they had been working on in the previous couple of years, but whose origin could at least be traced back to Olivier’s Lifelong Learning: The Need for Portable Personal Learning Environments and Supporting Interoperability Standards.

Summer of 2007 was, I believe, the actual taking off of the PLE. Though many had contributed to its conception (Oleg Liber, Scott Wilson, Graham Attwell, Mark Van Harmelen or Stephen Downes, to name just a few), I personally consider the publication of Wilson’s article the coming of age of the concept, and most especially because many interesting things would happen since in an explosive way, from the “massive” adoption of the concept to the “massive” adoption of Web 2.0 tools in formal and informal learning (as “massive” as we consider ourselves and our reflections on ICT and education “mainstream”, of course).

Managing the complex

Since 2003 — when this blog was born — and especially since mid 2007, things have changed a lot. Mainly three things have radically changed the information-sharing landscape:

• More people sharing information on the Net, boosted by the popularization of nanoblogging and social networking sites;
• more ways to share information on the Net, boosted by the “cloud” alternatives to desktop applications;
• a likely improvement in everyone’s (including me) digital skills, cause and consequence (make a virtue of necessity) of the former two.

According to that, my personal learning environment more or less looks now like this:

Infrastructure of a Personal Learning Environment [click to enlarge]

I used to rather call it personal research portal, as it had an explicit goal in (scientific) outreach and communication that most PLE do not. I’ll here stick to PLE for the sake of clarity and consensus.

Instead of wiring all the services I use between them, I chose to present it in a more sequential way (more on this in the second part on information management): information acquisition (input, what I get, in red), storage and processing (own self, in gray), diffusion and communication (output, what I create, in blue). Of course we cannot sequence information management this way: many tools are used for several purposes, processing is also a part of diffusion, etc. But I think it puts things in a clearer way.

The personal website — ICTlogy.net — is, of course, the core of the whole thing. I wrote back in December 2009 that:

What we do, what we are must be centralized. It is the image of what we do and become the one that has to be decentralized, not the essence.

I plead for the construction of the portfolio, for a return to the personal or institutional website, using social media as a game of mirrors that reflects us where we should also be present.

If anything, my vision of this statement has strengthened. I am, for instance, seriously considering shifting from Slideshare to iSpring. Or, at least, doing both: be present in Slideshare but upload and share in my site my own presentations in flash format.

This explains not only why the personal website (the areas shadowed in gray) is not only a huge hub where everything at least passes through, but why most information is embedded in there, especially all my own production. The blogs, the wiki, the bibliographic manager and the repository all are personal installations that surround my digital persona (here pictured as “about me”). Even the e-mail accounts, though managed with G-Mail, are my own domain’s. Moreover, the site also hosts a lifestream that works as Friendfeed collecting most my activity, but storing it on my own site.

Some reflections

First of all, it is important to note how relevant RSS has become as a vehicle to exchange information, but how embedding still is the option to present information, leaving APIs just a marginal role in the whole picture.

Linked to this, it is becoming increasingly industrious to keep record of your own production (whatever its quality). The result of this is that your digital persona and even your e-portfolio is scattered all over the Internet. This has consequences on the perception people have on you, thus consequences in how you are evaluated (knowledge, competences, behaviour). The forces that drive you to being present in the relevant places are opposite to the forces you have to apply to keep your things straightened up and under control. RSS feeds, open APIs and embedding help, and a personal website (including domain) is, in my opinion, becoming mandatory for every knowledge worker.

On the other hand, I would also like to stress the role of web analytics tools. If used for something more than quantitative measuring (pointless in my case, as visitors to my site come one by one and never in herds), these tools provide precious information if monitored carefully. Among others:

• Discover kindred souls that visited you and you hadn’t heard of. Of course, this fact deeply depends of you keeping in topic.
• Discover comments on your opinions and work.
• Discover works that have been listed besides your own, and that you hadn’t heard of.
• By construction, discover others’ ongoing work and projects and, sometimes, even be able to take part in them.

Keep reading: The Workings of a Personal Learning Environment (II): the information workflow.

Indeed, I think the core of the debate was not on the different conceptions of the PLE, but on the role of institutions and the educational system as a whole, and not in providing educational spaces through technology, but on their very same essence: do we need institutions and, if yes, of what kind and doing what.

While we get rid or not of institutions, they are still there, PLEs exist too and it would not be such a bad idea to try and build bridges amongst them. The iPLE is a very interesting approach, and I very much liked the communication SAPO Campus. Plataforma integrada de serviços web 2.0 para educação that Carlos Santos and Luis Pedro made at the VI Conferência Internacional de TIC na Educação. I came up with the HIPLE concept with Introducing the Hybrid Institutional-Personal Learning Environment (HIPLE), and now Steve Wheeler proposes a more generic term, Cloud Learning Environment, in his Anatomy of a PLE.

The complexity we’re putting ourselves into makes me feel the urge to somehow map all the concepts and approaches I’ve been seeing around in the last years. This is a gathering, not a taxonomy, and the definitions and sets will be purely personal.

Mapping the PLE-sphere [click to enlarge]

Institutions

Virtual Learning Environments (VLE), Online Learning Environments and Managed Learning Environments (MLE — sometimes also iMLE for Institutionally Managed Learning Environment) are the institutional ways to provide a platform for virtual learning (or to support the online part of blended learning). They stand for what some have called Virtual Campus or Online Campus.

As a platform, VLEs mainly have four big categories of applications and services:

• The applications that manage records, registrations and all the administrative staff. Most people call them Learning Management Systems (LMS).
• A place where to store learning materials, a Content Management System (CMS). LCMS is usually understood as LMS + CMS.
• A social layer, that is, directories, or virtual classrooms where students can interact. Let’s call this in-campus social layer Institutional Personal Learning Network (iPLN).
• A device where all the “production” of the student is stored and assessed. For the sake of clarity let’s call this just ePortfolio.

Individuals

The personal side is more chaotic. Under the concept of the Personal Learning Environment (PLE) we find everything (literally: everything) that a person is using to learn. In general terms, this is:

• Web 2.0 services, offered by third parties, that help them to blog, to share documents, to monitor people and content, etc.
• Sometimes, these services are not offered by third parties, but hosted and managed by the individual himself in his own domain. We talk then about Web 2.0 tools. The distinction, while technically not very relevant, it certainly is at the conceptual level.
• A social layer can also happen outside of campuses. If provided by a third party as a service, we’re facing the Social Learning Network (SLN) and it usually includes Web 2.0 tools.
• If self-built, we are talking about the Personal Learning Network (PLN). The difference between the SLN and the PLN is certainly blurry and maybe even arbitrary. I like to see them as SLN = PLN + Web 2.0 tools/services.

The institution-individual bridge

• If we add some Web 2.0 tools inside the institution (i.e. inside the VLE) and we link them with the social layer, we come up with an Institutional Personal Learning Environment (iPLE). We can even bring some content from the “outside” within the VLE by retrieving the information from external Web 2.0 services through the RSS pipeline.
• An alternative to the iPLE is the Hybrid Institutional Personal Learning Environment (HIPLE). The logic is very similar than the iPLE, but instead of retrieving content, the idea is that platforms speak one to each other by means of APIs. The difference with iPLEs is that HIPLEs allow for inside-outside interaction (not only reading or retrieving) in both senses while keeping both spheres (institutional and personal) separate; another difference is that the HIPLE allows the individual to use Web 2.0 tools provided by the institution and/or third parties, while the iPLE requires choosing either institutional tools or third parties’ (see, for instance, the HIPLE into practice with Twitter). It is very likely, though, that the iPLE and the HIPLE will end up merging as technology advances (though the conceptual differences will remain).

I tried to map all of these in the figure above. Colours have a meaning: greys refer to the institution and, especially, to the administration of learning; orange pictures the personal (believe or not, the ePortfolio is orange beneath those blue and grey layers); pink (or dark orange: the ambiguity is intended) make reference to the social; green are Web 2.0 tools and services; lastly, blue paints the bridging devices.

The communications were:

• Supporting personal learning, with Graham Attwell
• From personal to social: learning, with Sonia Guilana and Mar Camacho;
• Support to the process of online environment, with Berenice Blanco and Pilar Arrizabalaga.

I noticed that the common denominator of the session was support, in the sense of “let’s tell our ‘supportees’ what does work so they can put it into practice”. With this in mind, I suggested to have the presentations not in a horizontal manner (i.e. projects are fully explained one after the other one) but in a vertical manner: we identify the main and common topics addressed by the three projects and the topics are covered one by one, that is: we choose a topic and all the presenters explain how they faced it.

The topics we identified were:

• 1.- There are some problems in my learning process that need being addressed.
• 2.- We (or someone else) have tried several solutions to fix these problems and found that they did not work: which were these (non-)solutions?
• 3.- We (in our projects) have found some solutions that do work which ones are them?
• 4.- How have these solutions that work been evaluated and the outcomes assessed?
• 4a. How sere the solutions put into practice?
• 4b. How was their performance evaluated?

What follows is the personal notes that I took on the fly (slightly edited for the sake of clarity), both from the speakers and the audience. The notes were taken on a blank presentation that was projected in the room, so anyone could see them and, as it happened, comment on them.

Problems that need being addressed:

• Career advisors that handle huge amounts of knowledge. How to develop knowledge and share it? How to manage knowledge and make knowledge sharing work?
• Physicians with low competence on e-tutoring: How to train trainers in the use of digital artifacts for training? How to make, thus, e-tutoring more efficient?
• How to unclose the classroom?
• How to avoid the deviations of meaning added by technological mediation?
• How to fight certain attitudes that represent a barrier that prevent evolution/progress?

Solutions that did not work:

• Traditional e-learning is not an answer.
• Traditional training is nor an answer.
• There are no training programmes or learning materials for specialists.
• There is a deep ditch between knowledge management and e-learning.
• Traditional educational systems require “full dedication”.
• There are no “quick learning” programmes/methodologies, you always have to take the long path (but your needs/goals are in the short run).

Solutions that work (or not…):

• Stating strategies, defining paths.
• Designing and sharing models.
• The PLME: personal learning maturing environment, a place where to test things.
• Learning from the process itself and the context it is framed in.
• Process + context = way to fit training into everyone’s needs.
• Shareing not content but “people” by tagging the experts. Make the experts emerge: expert sharing (i.e. everyone is an expert). Indeed it is more about tagging people’s expertise than the experts themselves.
• Assessment indicators are (a) relative to everyone’s goals/needs (b) qualitative and related to own path.
• Assessment is yet another learning tool: feedback as feedback that really feeds the process back.

How were the solutions put into practice:

• Providing useful tips: starting your own blog, starting following someone you find interesting,
• Replicating.
• 1 learner, 1 PLE.

Note: this part was, of course, richer, but got diffused or covered by the other questions.

How was performance assessed:

• Checking whether the personal benefited the community.
• A virtual desktop enhances not only sharing but monitoring and co-design.
• Co-design leads to a certain degree of co-assessment.
• Co-design is needs-based, not externally based.
• e-Portfolios.
• Recursive design, recursive assessment.
• Extensive and intensive documentation while keeping hot tips simple.

I am aware that this dynamic penalizes knowing more about the projects themselves, so I encourage the reader to get in touch with the speakers or to visit their websites to get a deeper understanding on what they are working on (the how’s and the why’s, covered here ;)

Other videos in the set:

• All PLE_BCN Interviews
• Paulo Simoes
• Alec Couros
• Graham Attwell
• Carlos Santos Interview
• Jordi Adell
• Linda Castañeda
• Jane Challinor
• Cristina Costa Interview

Other videos of mine related to the PLE Conference

• #talkingabout: Jordi Adell and Ismael Peña-López on Personal Learning Environments
• Interview: Introducing the HIPLE: Hybrid Institutional-Personal Learning Environment

Ticked off the list a keynote and a dialogue, we came up with a game. We would present five pairs of dichotomies and will make the participants in the session to vote with their feet (à la Charles Tiebout). As some participants complained, the world is not black or white, but a richest range of grays, so to make people choose either or that option would be unfair. Yes it was, but (a) the exercise was about simplification, (b) highlighting the top values and (c) we had no room — space and time — for a continuous (vs. discrete) approach.

So, we draw a 2×2 matrix on the floor and projected the five pairs of dichotomies on a screen. People had then to physically move and place themselves in the quadrant of their choice according to their beliefs. We picture below the results of this voting with your feet. The numbers in the quadrants are just approximate, as no one even tried to really count the people in each quadrant, though they give a fair idea of the magnitudes at stake (there were circa 100 people in the room). I add to the screenshots some comments based on what I remember that Jordi and I said on the fly: they should so be attributed to both, as they were made indistinctly by one of us and I never had the sensation that we disagreed (I apologize in advance if, in the transcription, I put too much of myself in it).

1. PLEs and Institutions

• Do PLEs have a place in formal education?
• Shoud PLEs be procured institutionally or be placed outside institutions?

The first thing that is evident from the chart is that there is no agreement on whether institutions will be replaced by user-generated learning environments or, on the contrary, institutions will instead prevail but be leveraging the power of PLEs and other devices.

It is interesting to see that, despite the EduPunk momentum, the majority still believes on the power or need for institutions. Some commented that the participants were split in two: the Anglo-Saxon approach and the Latin one, being the former more pro-EduPunk and the latter more pro-institutions.

2. Openness

• The student’s digital identity must be isolated from the rest or be identified as a whole (the student has a single identity, regardless of their context)?
• The university must be an open or a closed environment?

While the previous point was definitely not about consensus, openness certainly was: no one doubted that the walls of formal education had to be torn down and that it increasingly made no sense to have an environment devoted only to learning and the rest where learning “did not happen”.

Notwithstanding, if learning happens anywhere, it does not necessarily follow that it happens anytime: though an overwhelming majority advocated also for tearing down the walls of the learner vs. professional, some voted for keeping the possibility to play a different role when you are actively learning than where you are not (at least in “active” terms).

3. The curriculum

• Who decides how the curriculum is designed: the system or the “apprentice”?
• Credit must be provided institutionally or socially (P2P)?

Unlike point 1, where institutions kept a good amount of power in providing and managing learning environments, when it comes to credit proportions swap: most people thought that the apprentice should be sovereign of their instructional design and how it will be measured and assessed.

This is definitely in line with a tacit agreement that students should lead their learning process, while teachers should accompany them through it, but walking side by side, never in front of it.

4. Barriers (I)

• The main barriers for change are institutional or individual?
• The main barriers for change are technological or pedagogical?

Concerning a first set of barriers — the usual dichotomy of education or technology — the majority pointed at the system: the problem is institutional and pedagogical.

Notwithstanding, and as it happened with EduPunk or institutionalism, the participants were mostly split between pedagogists and technologists, so it is likely that the latter were not as optimistic about technological barriers (digital divide, digital competence) than the former were.

5. Barriers (II)

• The main barriers for change are standardization (inflexibility) or atomization (chaos)?
• The main barriers for change are organizational or economical?

To reinforce the previous point, when looking at flexibility vs. resources and organization, the choices again are clear, even clearer than before, putting the educational system in the eye of the hurricane.

Conclusions?

Taken as a whole and not pair by pair, we noted that we could group the five dichotomies in two sets. On the one hand, we could take PLEs (1) and the Curriculum (3). As we have already set, these seem to show (show in the sense of the participants’ perceptions, of course!) that the trend is an increasing movement from institutions towards the student, a shift of the responsibility of one’s learning from schools to students that have not only to learn, but to learn what they have to learn, to learn to learn.

To help them in this endeavour, institutions have an important role as guides (not leaders) that have to trespass their own walls and enter the environments (in plural) where learning actually takes place, which increasingly is outside of the framework of formality.

In fact, this seems to be answering at the WHAT question: what is learning in the digital era?

The rest of pairs (Openness and the Barriers) seem to be pointing at the HOW question: how should learning be carried on in the digital era?. The answer seems to be open and flexible institutions, new educational systems and methodologies and a dire organizational change.

It is a little bit worrying that a hundred educators, deeply committed with the evolution of education and knowledgeable on instructional technology, despite their different and personal approaches, they all got together at pointing at the educational system — read: educational policies — as the problem of education. Any politician in da haus?

Debate

After the exercise we went on with a lively debate amongst all the attendants. Here come some random notes that I took on the fly and that were being beamed as I took them:

• Cyberinfrastructures should be used to leverage change, a change that should not only be in technology but also and especially inn attitudes.
• Are there enough resources to PLE-ize your discipline? Is everything PLE-izable? That is, is the PLE something that can be universally used in any discipline and environment?
• Teamwork as a pre-condition to PLE-ing: there is no (useful) PLE if it is not based in a framework of sharing and working as a community with a common goal.
• PLEs are bottom-up strategies: they originate in the bottom, but should target the upper spheres (i.e. Institutions). In this sense PLEs are not only a working tool, but a tool for change.
• PLEs are personal devices: we need to embed institutions, institutional aspects, and participation within our PLEs. In other words, institutions have to step into PLEs and these have their share of institutions. To do so, notwithstanding, institutions must be PLE-able, they have to rethink themselves, be more flexible, more open, and adapt to the new learning realities.
• PLEs as personal constructs vs. commodities: in our bridging institutions and individual learners through PLEs, do we incur in the risk of commoditizing personal learning environments and making of them extensions or tentacles of the all-eating institution?
• PLEs not to de-school society, but for un-schooled people. Or, better said, the stress the inclusion factor of PLEs as a way to bring education at reach of everyone: where institutions cannot reach, PLEs will.
• Institutions build the walls of libraries, PLEs fill them with books. PLEs have to go hand in hand with the structure, surround it, fill in the voids, enrich the always cold but needed concrete columns where a society lies upon.

Slides of the presentation

(just translated and put nicely)

They attended the PLE Conference and took some time to interview and tape some footage of Jordi Adell and I on the crossroads of Personal Learning Environments and institutions.

The video is in Catalan, one of Jordi and I’s mother tongues:

The main ideas are:

Why Personal Learning Environments (PLE)

• Why not.
• Scarcity of explicit knowledge (books) led us to gather it into libraries.
• Cost of access to books led us to gather them into universities and schools.
• Cost of access to wise men led us too to gather them into universities and schools.
• The digital made scarcity of knowledge no more an issue, and costs of access to experts dropped to nearly zero.

Why institutional Virtual Campuses or why institutional Learning Management Systems?

• It still is difficult to tell good knowledge from bad (low information literacy levels around).
• Thus, we have a need for a curation of knowledge, for guides, to validate all the knowledge that has been fixed in digital artifacts.
• Not everyone can or wants to use the latest technology.
• Many people still have low digital literacy levels.
• Indeed, there are privacy, security and/or data ownership issues.
• And we have to ease monitoring, assessment and evaluation tasks (we are not hee taking about the need to monitor, assess or evaluate — let’s assume for a moment that many people still want to do that).

So, PLEs or institutional virtual campuses?

• We need to cope with both needs: the benefits (freedom) of digital technologies and some long-lasting (and maybe needed) trends.
• We should be able to find a middle-ground solution between centrifugal and centripetal forces.
• We have to keep intimacy, while allow third parties’ ideas in our conversation.
• We want to keep noise out, while keeping a window open to the outside.
• We should be free to either use an institutional tool, a third party’s, or one’s own, and nevertheless guarantee that conversation is the same for everyone.
• We should be able to keep our own learning space while participating in a collective one.
• And we should be able to keep a closed record of what a group did for later assessment or simply storage.

NOTE: sound quality is awful. Sorry about that.

In Introducing the Hybrid Institutional-Personal Learning Environment (HIPLE) I dealt with the different profiles, behaviours and needs that concur in online education (or online enhanced education). I also asked for a way to be able to give a satisfactory answer to all the problems that arouse with that concurrence while being able to swim and keep one’s clothes dry at the same time (as we say in Catalan).

Let us put it into practice with a totally applied example using Twitter.

The typical situation

The context is an online course on e-Government. There is a character (ONcampus) which is a student that, for unspecified reasons, just wants to access the virtual campus to study and that everything that happens on the campus remains unknown for the outer world. There is a second character (ictlogist) that is also a student and uses several Web 2.0 tools for learning (call it a Personal Learning Environment or PLE), amongst them Twitter, and just does not want to use two nanoblogging tools, one on-campus and another one off-campus. A third character (OFFcampus) is a professional working on eGovernment and, as such, uses Twitter to interact with other people on the field.

What you usually would have is two conversations:

• Inside the campus, a closed conversation that neither benefits from “outside” conversations nor contributes to them. Including the student remaining unknown to other people on the field.
• Outside campus, an open but not-permeating-the-campus conversation and that forces some people to attend two conversations on the same field mostly with different people but similar purposes.

The HIPLE to the rescue

Imagine a nanobloging tool (e.g. StatusNet) installed inside the virtual campus classroom. Everything that happens in there is invisible to the outside world. But everything you tag with #uoc_egov (the “official” hashtag for the course) is published on Twitter.

In fact, everything you publish on Twitter with the #uoc_egov hashtag is imported onto the nanobloggin tool installed in the virtual campus, so everyone can see it. Thus allowing people to participate in the closed classroom from outside of the campus.

In fact, messages from other people alien to the closed classroom can also be seen inside the classroom, provided that (a) they add the #uoc_egov hashtag and (b) we have not added a filter to the closed nanoblogging tool that not only filters by hashtag but also by user (in this case, students could participate from their Twitter accounts but the classroom would only be participated by enrolled students).

The Hybrid Institutional-Personal Learning Environment (HIPLE) into practice:
an example with Twitter [click to enlarge]

Benefits

• Students can opt to participate only in the classroom and be invisible to off-campus users.
• Students can opt to participate from outside the classroom and with their own tools. In the limit, they will only participate from their own PLEs and not from the virtual campus.
• Off-campus students engage in real conversations with “real” professionals and experts in the field. Exposure is likely to be good.
• Faculty and managers can, if thus desired, use the closed environment to “contain” what is to be monitored or assessed, and without the need to wander around “chasing” spontaneous and ubiquitous contributions from their students.

The increase of open APIs shouldn’t make these kind of developments very difficult. Of course there are thousands of applications and one will always have to choose which ones to “bridge”. But (a) there are not many really popular applications and, in fact, (b) that is what standards are for.

In Funnelling concepts in Education 2.0: PLE, e-Portfolio, Open Social Learning I made a plead for equidistance and eclecticism and performed a first exploration on how to cope centralization with decentralization, the institutional and the individual, the traditional Learning Management System (LMS) with the undefined and polymorphous Personal Learning Environment (PLE).

Two concurring projects in the last weeks make me revisit that topic:

• My participation in the implementation of a very small line in the Strategyc Plan 2010-2014 of the Open University of Catalonia, which consists in foster student participation in the Virtual Campus, based on the philosophy of social networking sites.
• My participation — along with Carlos Casado, Enric Mor, César Córcoles, Gemma Aguado and Juan Francisco Sánchez — in an educational innovation project to test different uses of Twitter in an online classroom.

Common issues

Both projects share some issues — I dare not call them problems, though some of them are absolutely challenging —that have definitely to be addressed before implementing any kind of project:

• With the increase of broadband penetration and the popularization of Web 2.0 tools and spaces, most participation (and a lot of it, indeed) happens outside the campus, unlike what was usual just 10 (or even 5) years ago.
• With the realization of the concept of long-life learning, it is increasingly difficult to tell students from non-students, and even from members of the university community from non-members, especially when one can attend conferences online, download learning materials or follow the faculty or institutional initiatives on Twitter or their own blogs.
• Just for the two previous reasons, one’s own learning management increasingly happens off-campus too.
• And yet there’s the issue of where the experts are. Some of the experts are in-campus, but many of them (other faculty, professionals, potential employers) are off-campus too. And we definitely want our students to meet the relevant (online) communities of experts and people they should (and we want them to) be in contact with.
• But: learning monitoring does require a certain degree of centralization and closeness or quietness, for many reasons: assessment, guidance, “noise filtering”… Or, at least, some educators feel more at ease in these “controlled” scenarios. Not to speak about managers.
• And: some people are reluctant to use all that arcane network technologies, because of lack of knowledge, lack of competence, even lack of social skills.
• And: some people just do not want to have their identity spread all over the e-place, but to be able to manage different digital personnae. Sometimes for privacy; sometimes for security reasons.

A proposal

So, there are people in and people off the Virtual Campus. There are geeks and explorers and digerati, and there are refuseniks and robinsons and goffmans too.

So, to respect and answer all demands, what do we need?

• That the members of the university community that so wish it, can interact with their peers and teachers and all kind of educational resources with the tools and platforms own choice (e.g. off-campus), and thus concentrate or diffuse their activity at will.
• That the members of the university community that so wish it, can maintain an idea of a campus as a space dedicated to learning, and use the tools within without having to disperse their energies (and attention) in (for them) low added value activities.
• Despite the above said, tear down the concept walls of in- and off-campus, and member and non-member of the learning community. Let third parties participate of learning life, and let active and formal learners participate of informal learning or professional life.

What’s in a name

I ask for a hybrid-institutional personal learning environment. I ask for a HIPLE:

• The HIPLE Is a PLE.
• The HIPLE is a hi-PLE.
• The HIPLE rhymes with hype ;)

At this point, please allow me to bring back what I draw in Funnelling concepts in Education 2.0: PLE, e-Portfolio, Open Social Learning:

[click to enlarge]