To date we have performed user testing, but in controlled circumstances designed to elicit system functionality and user interface improvements. This has been successful, and we have made significant improvements to the system as a result. As our next stage testing, we have now moved on to a real live trial with a small group of students.

This trial is to support a first-year experiential learning project. In this project students explore the web; teach themselves PHP, HTML and CSS (with some staff help); decide what web site they would like to implement; and then implement that site. We are using the PLE to support one group of students in their exploration of the web and web technologies, and to support peer-assisted learning. In this we are lucky in having an ethnographer colleague, Dave Randall, to assist in the investigation of the student's experience.

With regard to developing the system, we are currently improving the user interface, adding mini-feeds so students can be easily aware of what others are doing, and adding a few other little tweaks that will enable the PLE to be used in larger trials.

In fact, we are in an ongoing beta at the moment -- not only will we be highly responsive to our students’ ongoing experience, but, as ever, other enhancements are on our mind: For example, we are currently evaluating Google’s OpenSocial to see what effect this may have on us.

All with a big thanks to Emerge for mini-funding!

One possible day is Friday 27th July (this coming Friday) preferably in Manchester.

It would be possible to meet in Manchester / Birmingham / London on that day or the following week, depending on interest and locus of interested people. Please comment here or e-mail me as mark -a-t- cs.man.ac.uk, and if there is a movement towards meeting I'll put something together. 

Besides the 'usual' social software features, we have some specific targets for the PLE:

• Supporting learning in communities that form around a specific learning goal or set of related goals, e.g. "I want to learn about PLEs and how to use them". For now we adopt a more popular term for learning goal, namely, wish
• The ability to create, adopt, adapt, and reuse learning plans
• The ability to structure ideas and depictions of knowledge around wishes as individuals and communities construct knowledge
• A light touch with existing Web 2.0 facilities, e.g. incorporation of your blog into the PLE if you wish to keep on using an existing blog
• Collaborative editing of various kinds of artifacts, including learning plans
• The ability to deal with some generally less well supported aspects of learning activities, automatic discovery of boundary objects, merging and splitting of communities, automatic suggestion of learning partners
• Real time communication accessible via user profiles and other user representations in the system

The list goes on, and in the available time we have we are not going to realise all of our list,  but we are going full tilt and aiming at achieving at least the first five of these.

One reason for fast work is the skill of the implementation team, for example, two of the team are part of the team behind an innovative PHP MVC framework that we are employing. Another reason is the development method that we are using. This is Scrum, which certainly should be added to the UIDM (the UIMD is a bit light on agile management techniques). We are using Scrum to deliver successive iterative prototypes every two weeks, and we hope, with plenty of scope for egg (or is that elgg) on our faces, to have a first demo featuring user profiles, community membership and administration, basic search facilities, and basic editing for learning plans and wish-idea structuring running live at the Manchester Emerge event.

For the techies here, the technologies being used are MySQL, PHP, the highly efficient PHP MVC framework oolime, (also used in the gorgeous beocia, a MMORPG, unfortunately still in beta) and Flex 2, together with, for enhanced performance, various LAMP caching technologies in the background. The use of Flex makes the system a Rich Internet Application. 

The prototype is being built by five MSc students (Ian Bell, Greg Bouteiller, Mathieu Perrin, Eric Raffin and Ashish Ughade) with myself (Mark van Harmelen) doing a bit of hands-off building. 

Ian,  Greg,  Mathieu,  Eric,  Ashish,  Mark 

Keep an eye out for us in Manc! We'll be only too pleased to chat with you! 

The PLE movement sprung up from a wave of disenchantment with VLEs and the centralised control model of education that they represent. Instead, an informing philosophy was learner empowerment, taking responsibility for one's own education. In parallel with this learning was seen as a social act, that significant learning (or, even, all learning) occurs in a social context -- even the act of learning something from a book on ones own is social, because language and shared understanding underpins and enables such 'solitary' learning experiences. 

A useful definition is that "Personal Learning Environments are systems that help learners take control of and manage their own learning. This includes providing support for learners to

• set their own learning goals
• manage their learning; managing both content and process
• communicate with others in the process of learning

and thereby achieve learning goals.

A PLE may be composed of one or more subsystems: As such it may be a desktop application, or composed of one or more web-based services." [MvH, here and here]

Thus more and more I have become to believe that a PLE is a social network based system; it embodies a specific educational philosophy, but importantly it enables people to decide on educational goals and help each other with their own education.

So two things make a PLE quite different from a VLE (i) learner control and (ii) social networking and peer-assisted learning.

Notes: It is true that Blackboard and other VLE suppliers are starting to fold Web 2.0 tools into their products, but I don't believe that the PLE-VLE distinction has disappeared yet. A PLE could quite adequately serve in a teacher-assisted learning scenario, and there is movement from the traditional teaching/lecture model towards teacher-assisted learning, see this report on Web 2.0 in Teaching and Learning. Finally a PLE could just be composed from various Web 2.0 systems out there on the web. Some consider that their blog is a PLE.

OK, what to recommend to look at on PLEs? Cruising around slideshare today, while writing a talk for the upcoming MIMAS Conference, I came across a new presentation by Graham Attwell. How about that for a start... and I ramble on with Graham on PLEs in a podcast on here. For an alternate view try this podcast with Niall Sclacter.

And a thought, is this Elgg a PLE? Is it in any way optimal as a PLE, however we might define optimal?

So what's my PLE? For now (but see here), definitely the web, accessed via Firefox, and with, particularly, a reasonably well organised toolbar that allows me to access web sites easily, and delicious buttons that allow me to bookmark easily.

So for the interested, we can start by defining Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) as "systems that help learners take control of and manage their own learning. This includes providing support for learners to

• set their own learning goals
• manage their learning; managing both content and process
• communicate with others in the process of learning

and thereby achieve learning goals.

A PLE may be composed of one or more sub-systems: As such it may be a desktop application, or composed of one or more web-based services." (defined here).

In relation t this definition, the more I think about PLEs, the more I come to the conclusion that, except in very special circumstances, they are social software systems accessed via a browser. (Ducks head...)

There is a mass of references to PLE literature here, mostly material from the blogosphere.

I suspect that if you join this community you will be able to cross post your blog postings on PLEs here, and we can build up a mass of (interesting?) material.

Feel free too to edit the community profile.

Regards

Mark van Harmelen

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* "Just do it" used with apologies to underage factory workers everywhere