ICTlogy

What now follows is a (fake) interview I prepared for the PLE Conference and that sort of sums up the articles Introducing the Hybrid Institutional-Personal Learning Environment (HIPLE) and The Hybrid Institutional-Personal Learning Environment (HIPLE) into practice: an example with Twitter.

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.

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