I first read about PLE in Viplav Baxi’s blog. Then I came across it again in a blog that I am currently following with great interest – Michele Martin’s The Bamboo Project. Michele’s blog has many posts about PLE and her blog and the Bamboo project make an interesting case study for using Web 2.0 tools for collaborative learning. And of course my much revered blogger Tony Karrer has many posts on PLE. And with a little more research, I realize that I am about 6 months behind in discussions on PLEs :-).
I guess my top 10 learning tools are basically my personal learning environment. To define my PLE further, I could probably identify the blogs/sites I visit more often for learning.
There is also an ongoing discussion on enterprises having PLEs within the firewall. In the process I discovered Tom Haskin’s blog and quickly added it to my PLE. I understand that PLE stands for Personal Learning Environment (well, in most contexts anyway but Tom provides more descriptions of the P in PLE). An organization can provide a “learning environment” within the firewall for employees to learn. If it is indeed used by employees to learn, the inside the firewall learning environment becomes part of the employee’s PLE. I am not sure how a corporate can provide PLE. At best it can attempt to encourage employees to recognize their own PLEs and try to provide them with learning environments that the employees will adopt in their PLEs.
Some related thoughts here. Something has to be thought for how to include collaborative learning through PLEs in the enterprise. However, most people at present see this like a proprietary vs open source debate. I am not sure that is entirely good.
Corporations have lots to worry about, hence the firewalls — but the word is a metaphor, and needs some revisiting. If the telephone had just been invented, no doubt IT would insist on a telephonic firewall, so you couldn’t talk to anyone outside the corporation and give away secrets.
The attempt by the organization to shape how people learn (rather than to make it easier for them to learn as they see best for themselves) reminds me of the special General Electric staples I used to get at work. A box with “General Electric” and the logo on it.
They were just plain old standard staples, but someone saw fit to have them in a GE-approved box.