The Personal Learning Environment Framework (PLEF)

In contrast to traditional LMS-driven e-learning solutions, a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) takes a more natural and learner-centric approach and is characterized by the freeform use of a set of lightweight services and tools that belong to and are controlled by individual learners. Rather than integrating different services into a centralized system, the idea is to provide the learner with a plethora of different services and hand over control to her to select, use, and mashup the services the way she deems fit. A PLE driven approach does not only provide personal spaces, which belong to and are controlled by the user, but also requires a social context by offering means to connect with other personal spaces for effective knowledge sharing and collaborative knowledge creation (Chatti et al., 2007).

The Personal Learning Environment Framework (PLEF) supports the learners in taking control over their learning experience by aggregating, managing, tagging, commenting, and sharing their favorite resources (e.g. feeds, widgets, and different media) within a personalized space. PLEF differs from popular personalized start pages such as iGoogle, My Yahoo, Netvibes, or Pageflakes mainly in six important points:

1. PLEF uses OpenID for authentication.
2. PLEF supports commenting and sharing of all PLE elements.
3. Access control is defined at both PLE page and element levels.
4. Besides a traditional page view, PLEF provides a tag view of all PLE elements. Learners can add tags in order to be able to classify, categorize, search and re-find their PLE elements at a later time.
5. PLEF provides a navigation sidebar where you can (1) drag-and-drop to move PLE elements between pages or change the order of the pages, and (2) click a tag to see its associated elements.
6. PLEF supports full-text and tag-based search of PLE elements.

You can see here an example of a PLEF page I created to follow the ongoing distributed discussion on connectivism and connective knowledge.

Technologies used for the development of PLEF include Google GWT and GWT-Ext that I would highly recommend for your AJAX applications.

Please feel free to visit the project homepage and test PLEF. This is a first step toward a personal learning environment framework which should meet the requirements discussed here. I would dearly love to hear your opinions on the ideas behind PLEF and in particular your suggestions to supplement this work. If you would like to contribute a short report of your experiences with PLEF, report bugs, support the development of this project, or take on the development yourself, please don't hesitate to contact me.

Engage me...We are digital learners...

Stephen Downes on Personal Learning Environments

Stephen Downes has given a great presentation on PLEs at Brandon Hall Innovations in Learning 2008 Conference, San Jose, California. Slides are available on Slideshare.

Personal Learning Environments

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: cck08 downes)

ALOA

Our paper "ALOA: A Web Services Driven Framework for Automatic Learning Object Annotation" has been published by Springer (.pdf, project homepage).

Abstract:

Generating learning object metadata is a complex task to be done manually. An automated approach is therefore required. This work presents the concepts and ideas behind the automatic generation of metadata. We propose a Web Services driven framework for IEEE LOM-compliant automatic learning object annotation called ALOA. The primary focus has been on the flexibility and extensibility of the framework, such that new metadata generation services can easily be plugged into the basic system.

PLEF Requirements

I’m currently working on a Personal Learning Environment Framework (PLEF) that needs to address the following attributes:

- Personalized: PLEF should provide the learner with ability to incorporate a myriad of tools and services; and ability to determine and use the tools and services the way she deems fit to create her own PLE, adapted to her own situation and needs. It is crucial to provide access to a wide range of tools and services that support different learning activities such as production, distribution, reflection, and discussion. It is also important to enable customized search across the collection of learning items in one’s own PLE as well as in peer PLEs. PLEF should also offer learner-defined access control mechanisms for each PLE item, as well as support for multi-views of the PLE, enabling the learner to filter the mass of available knowledge sources based on her needs, and switch between multiple learning contexts.

- Social: PLEF should support the building of interactive environments by offering means to connect with other personal spaces, such that learners can engage in knowledge sharing and collaborative knowledge creation. Social features such as social tagging, commenting, and sharing have to be supported.

- Extensible: PLEF should have a flexible architecture enabling learners to enrich their PLEs with a heterogeneous set of services. A learner should be able to easily integrate, aggregate, and mash-up different learning services (e.g. feeds, widgets, media, lightweight JSON/REST-based Web Services) based on her needs and interests.

- Open: PLEF should be based on open standards (e.g. RSS, OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial) to ensure interoperability and communication with other services. It should also provide a public API that can be used by third-party services.

- Ubiquitous: PLEF should provide means for flexible delivery and ubiquitous access to PLEs from multiple channels and wide variety of platforms and (mobile) devices.

- Filter: One concern with knowledge-pull approaches is information overload. Therefore, PLEF should provide powerful filters, that tap the wisdom of crowds (e.g. recommendations, ratings, rankings, reviews, votes, comments) to help learners find quality in the Long Tail.

- Easy to use: PLEF should provide rich experience with e.g. AJAX support. A learner should be able to copy-and-paste and drag-and-drop elements to personalize and manage her PLE with minimum effort.

What do you see are other critial requirements of a personal learning environment framework?