Personal Learning Environments

by Javi Portillo

Also known as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or Software On-demand, online software is a new way to use software applications. In the online Software model, data and functionality are accessed via the Internet.

Online software offers significant advantages such as:

• Foreseeable and fixed cost: pay per user monthly. Forget unexpected maintenance costs and incidents linked to software systems.
• Reduce your IT structure: use the IT resources within your organization to support other key objectives.
• Reduce implementation time: in a few hours, you can have your new software-based process up and running.
• Increase your productivity: at a very low cost, apply professional solutions to the management of your sales activity.
• Universal access: you can work whenever and wherever you wish via the Internet. All that is required is to have access to a browser and to have an Internet connection.
• Constant update: our developers’ team works continuously to upgrade our software, improving its functionality and usability without the need for you to neither install nor upgrade anything.
• Affordable access to the best technology on the market: with the old licensing costs, small and medium enterprises found it impossible to automate some critical business processes. Online software offers professional solutions with the latest technology to any company, at an affordable price.

clipped from www.b-kin.com

With the proliferation of online services these days, you probably have many different usernames and passwords that you have to remember. Maybe you do use unique passwords, and get around the problem of remembering them by saving them in your browser, or storing them in a spreadsheet or other file – which is very insecure – or even writing/printing them on a piece of paper and taping it to your computer display. Maybe you even use one of the many password managers that are available. We need not even mention the security risks inherent with that solution. Even if you trust the company storing the passwords, you can be sure every hacker in the world is drooling over the prospect of accessing their database. Ideally, you should use a unique, strong password for each of your accounts.

What if you could use passwords that are as unique as fingerprints for each and every one of your accounts, yet not have to remember them? PasswordMaker allows you to do just that. By using complex mathematical formulae, called hashing algorithms, PasswordMaker outputs the same unique passwords for you each and every time, provided you give it the same input. And these passwords are unique across the globe (providing they are of sufficient length). Don’t write them down on sticky notes for others to find; no, PasswordMaker calculates them for you over and over again — as needed — without storing them so they can’t be stolen. And if you use more than one computer (for example, one at work and one at home), it’s child’s play to synchronize them. There’s even an on-line version for times when you are at a public computer and can’t install any software.

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Posted on passwordmaker.org

References to the term in the UK Government’s e-strategy, Harnessing Technology: Transforming Learning and Children’s Services (DfES, 2005), indicate that E-portfolios are part of a personal online space, where learners can store their work, record their achievements (a repository function), and access personal course timetables (an organising function), digital resources relevant to their own study (personalised information) and links to other learners (for collaboration and feedback). The focus is clearly on space for learning. As well as using such spaces in schools, colleges and universities, the intention is to enable the development of ‘electronic portfolios that learners can carry on using throughout life. Broadly, the product (e-portfolio) is a purposeful selection of items (evidence) chosen at a point in time from a repository or archive, with a particular audience in mind.

The approach should include online repositories, planning and communication tools, and opportunities for both students and teachers to draw out and present e-portfolios at particular times and for particular purposes. There is then likely to be substantial impact on learning processes:

• Some learners in all age ranges who find that software that includes structured processes and organisational tools (such as templates for planning, calendars and goal-setting exercises) scaffolds their learning until they are confident enough to progress to working independently.

• Tools that support the important learning process of feedback from teachers and peers, and collaboration within class groups and across institutions.

• There is a great potencial to make connections between e-portfolio processes, such as storing, reflecting and publishing, and learners’ use of emerging social software tools used outside formal education.

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Posted in Becta: impact study of e-portfolios on learning on June 2007

We have to elaborate the set of connections between what an institution offers and what individuals manage. There does seem to be a real need for a concrete coordination system sitting between the personal system and the enterprise, for handling jobs such as initial rendezvous and peer association. For some users this disappears quickly in favour of directly incorporating course feeds and widgets into their own environments. For others, this coordination system becomes a primary point of use.

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Posted in Scott Wilson’s Workblog on 2007/11/13

Mainstream VLEs offer competing sets of proprietary features, but because of the continuous need to innovate and experiment, they must have an architecture that supports a rich facility for extension plus extensions. This is the sign of an emerging architectural trend toward defining the VLE as limited set of core capabilities that can integrate tools together from many sources.

“I certainly don’t see the VLE or LMS continuing in the form that they currently are, where are you have a monolithic application with lots and lots of different tools presented to teachers and students. You very quickly come to the limits of any tool that you use. The answer is to abandon the tool you have been using and to swap in another tool. [...] I can see a situation where the VLE or LMS actually shrinks to a container into which you plug these learning tools.”

Dr. Andrew Booth of Leeds University

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This text has been extracted from Charles Severance’s “The coming Functionality Mashup in Personal Learning Environments” article.

Some institutions have realized of the benefits of applications with which students, beyond the boundaries of the VLEs, have the ability to collect, develop, publish and share resources, taking more responsibility in their learning. The idea behind these applications is to provide a customizable framework based on a loosely-coupled design -open standards and open APIs-, allowing users to plug-in their own favourite tools and services, and providing interoperability with other applications such as VLEs.

A PLE fits perfectly in described application the profile. However, its implementation is not straightforward, as different strategies may be feasible for its development. While the general need for PLEs is quite clear, we are only beginning to see examples of technology which may show us a practical technical path forward.

[...] we can also consider the possibility a new design which represents not just a refinement of the VLE but an entirely new design pattern [...] using a combination of existing devices (laptops, mobile phones, portable media devices), applications (browsers, calendars, newsreaders, instant messaging clients) and services (blogs, wikis, social bookmark services)

This text has been extracted from Wilson, S.; Liber, O.; Johnson, M.; Beauvoir, P.; Sharples, P. and Milligan C. – “Personal Learning Environments: challenging the dominant design of educational systems”

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If the VLE shrinks to become a much simpler container which makes use of standards and brings together and organizes the capabilities of a wide range of tools around a particular learning context, then it is much more likely that this new minimal VLE can be modified to become a PLE [...] The difference between a PLE and a VLE then becomes very blurred, perhaps inconsequential – what matters are the learning context, who owns the learning contexts and where the learning contexts are stored [...] This idea opens a potential path forward in flexible VLE system design, one that can naturally evolve into PLE systems.

This text has been extracted from Charles Severance’s “The coming Functionality Mashup in Personal Learning Environments” article.

LMS systems have afforded teachers the capacity to create their own web courses with minimal programming expertise or even instructional design support. Thus, they have become essential and very popular tools for early and late majority users.

Similarly, PLEs are nowhere near as easy to use to facilitate and support many of the educational functions that are trivial in modern LMS systems. I eagerly await the day when both formal and informal connected learning opportunities are a natural and spontaneous outgrowth of our personal computing environment – but I don’t think it is time to throw away the LMS just yet.

Nonetheless, the PLE future seems to be more secure than that of any monolithic LMS. I suspect the LMS systems that survive will do so by opening themselves to standards based enhancements, service requests and the strong evolutionary move towards real learner centric educational applications.

Posted in Virtual Canuck on 2006/01/09

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It is one of the invariant laws of technology that any new system must co-exist with the previous systems; in the case of education, while the VLE pattern should lose its status as the dominant design, the technology will be arround us for a long time. So, how will the PLE and the VLE co-exist?

• Parallel lives, with the PLE becoming the dominant design on informal learning and with the VLE remaining the key technology of formal educational systems.

• Period of connection, whereby VLE products start to open their services for use within the PLE.

• Co-opting, whereby the characteristics of the PLE are incorporated into the VLE.

This text has been extracted from Wilson, S.; Liber, O.; Johnson, M.; Beauvoir, P.; Sharples, P. and Milligan C. – “Personal Learning Environments: challenging the dominant design of educational systems”

• Identity: learners have existences beyond formal school, that can be used to both help learners contextualize their own understanding and for others to understand their epistemological legacy.

• Persistence: the reflective posting of a blog is a digital record of the learning process. They can be an integral part of the lifelong learning accomplishment. They should not disappear at the end of a course.

Posted in Virtual Canuck on 2006/01/09

After reading the following Donald Clark’s words, I am reflecting on the fact that none of the two VLEs of my university covers the eportfolio feature. Furthermore, students profiles (personal folder and assesments) are deleted by system administrator from one year to another…