Week 2: Personal Learning Environments

This week, we investigated the concept of a personal learning environment (PLE) and why it is important to us as students. Candice Figg described a personal learning environment as, "the set of digital tools to support your personal learning (Figg, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaxpCFuPNcQ)." From the multiple sources studied this week, my general view on a PLE is that it is the group of tools we use in our lives that help us enhance our learning, by providing support for us when setting goals, helps us manage and process content, and communicate and interact with others with a goal of enhancing our mutual learning - in other words, creating a personal learning network (PLN) through our personal learning environment (Digenti, 1999). With the Web 2.0, which emphasizes online cooperation and sharing among users to promote cooperative learning, there is no reason for me to not take advantage of everything that is out there and expand my personal learning environment!

This content studied this week included a discussion on the difference between the LMS and a PLE. While I have slowly gotten much more comfortable with using Brock's LMS Sakai, I have yet to truly develop my PLE. A website presented in this week's session (http://microbiologybytes.com/tutorials/ple/index.html) looked at the differences and similarities between the LMS and the PLE. While the LMS is an effective management tool, the PLE is much more individualized and allows students to more efficiently use online resources their OWN way. In my opinion, though, both are absolutely necessary, especially because of their similarities in enhancing our learning, and an LMS provides guidance for students still new to the idea of building a PLE (in other words, myself). The following image suggests the differences between the two:

("PLE," 2011)

(http://juandomingofarnos.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/lms-vs-ple.png)

In his Prezi presentation, Andre Malan quoted Micahel Welsh as saying that, in the 21st century, it is more important to be able to find, sort, discuss, critique, share and create information (being knowledge-able), than to be able to recall information (being knowledgeable). I completely agree with this suggestion, and have observed its influence on higher education in the recent years - professors have been increasingly stressing research skills and ability to retrieve information on top of learning textbook information. With the technology we have today, it is much more efficient to be competent in searching for important information than trying to memorize every idea and concept, which is why it is extremely important to develop and expand my personal learning environment as a student. Looking at my current PLE, it contains only very basic resources, and I am getting the sense that I am not completely embracing all of the available technology out there that can enhance my PLE. I especially lack resources that help me organize content and practice digital responsibility, which is increasing my personal learning environment by getting comfortable with using different online resources is one of my main goals in this course.

As a psychology major, it is especially important for me to expand my PLE in terms of practicing digital literacy. I need to increase the amount of sources I have that will allow me to retrieve information from credible sources, as research and information retrieval will be a key element of my learning in coming years. The following image shows the difference between scholarly and popular sources - Wikipedia, for example, would be a popular source, and sources like those would not add much to my personal learning environment, as they are not academically credible.

("Popular vs. scholarly," 2013)

(http://www2.potsdam.edu/libdocs/images/RDTutorial-popscholarly.jpg)

I found the YouTube video uploaded by Wendy Dexter to be most helpful in helping me learn about how I can build my PLE (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=XwM4ieFOotA). The narrator listed the crucial steps to be taken to building a PLE as (in no specific order) (1) finding valid sources, (2) ensuring their credibility, (3) searching for scholarly sources, (4) posting findings to social bookmarking sites, (5) searching blogs for opinions and other people's perspectives, and (6) posting one's own blog to share reflections about what the student has learned. These are all steps I will experiment with this semester to develop my PLE. The final suggestion, in my opinion, was the most interesting - the narrator suggested that one of the sources that students can add to their PLE is to use podcasts such as iTunes U. I tend to have my headphones in a lot, and I have been searching for ways to learn even when I'm walking down the hallway listening to something, and the podcast idea just seems to be the perfect suggestion! I am often a verbal and visual learner, also, so using auditory learning during my spare time will be refreshing and interesting.

We were also instructed to try out the use of WordCloud this week. I find this tool extremely interesting and helpful - students can identify the key concepts of the text in a visually stimulating and interesting way. I will be using this device before studying a text to get a general sense of the key and important concepts that I should be paying more attention to.

I look forward to further expanding my personal learning environment throughout this course, but for now, that's it from me this week!

Lau, L. (CC) 2014. 

Lau, L. (CC) 2014.