Personal Learning Environments

Personal Learning Environments are an interesting idea we’ve seen codify recently. A PLA is a system that helps learners take control of and manage their own learning. Kind of like your own web based library or school. A repository to store, share and index your acquired knowledge, notes and wisdom. It can be a form of personal branding and a portfolio of learning. Also similar to a resume, but it’s more for your reference. PLA’s use a mix of online and offline tools, usually organized in some way online.

Michele Martin of The Bamboo Project explains:

To get an idea of what I mean by a personal learning environment (or PLE) , here’s a working definition from Ron Lubensky who has written a nice summary on the concept:

“a Personal Learning Environment is a facility for an individual to access, aggregate, configure and manipulate digital artifacts of their ongoing learning experiences.”

In other words, a PLE is a combination of the formal and informal tools and processes we use to gather information, reflect on it and do something with it, which is essentially what we mean when we talk about learning.

Note that I mention that informal learning is a big part of the PLE. By some estimates, 75-80% of on-the-job learning is done informally–that is, outside of a classroom-based (physical or virtual), highly structured learning situation. With the growth of the Internet and a variety of second generation web tools, the ability to construct a personal learning environment that emphasizes and leverages informal learning has really exploded.

Wonderwebby: “Life Oriented Personal Learning Environments”