Stephen Downes' video, "Personal Learning Environments" introduced me to a new term in the field of education. In many ways, a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) for students reminded me of some of the different functions made available by programs such as Google Reader. A PLE consists of a combination of various tools that the user might place in their 2.0 toolkit. For example a user's PLE might include: personal documents, websites that the user frequents, or feeds and blogs that the user has subscribed to. The user will is able to use their PLE to network with a community of people and share their thoughts and ideas through e-mails and newsletters. Communicating and learning with others is the central idea behind the development of a PLE. In fact, using PLE's in this manner has helped Downes instruct an online class with over 2,200 students who all collaborated and learned from one another.
Developing a PLE will help students become actively involved in their learning process. The collection of various websites and resources will immerse students in learning so that they are not simply learning a set of facts, but are instead demonstrating a thorough understanding of the material. Downes gave the example of a student performing acts as a geographer would rather than sharing facts about geography.
As educators, we must help our students develop a PLE of their own. We can do this first by continuously learning about different resources that are available. Afterward, we can share these resources with our students so that they can learn from them and use them to share their knowledge with their peers. Students should be encouraged to communicate, share ideas, and learn from one another. Once they have developed their PLE, they will continuously have access to sites of interest to them and be able to actively participate in a learning community.
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