Summary

What are Personal learning Environments? How can we use them to help us in our learning process? How difficult is it to start one? Join us at this session and let's explore PLEs together! .

Proposed by Ricardo Torres Kompen, Coordinator of the DigitalOrchard project at Citilab Cornellà - http://citilab.eu | ricardo.torres.kompen [at] gmail.com | @torresk on Twitter

What do you want to achieve?

This session has the following goals:

1. take a look at the different definitions and approaches to the PLE concept.
2. explore four approaches to building and managing PLEs
3. set up at least two PLE hubs, using an aggregator page and a browser.

Who should come? How many? For how long? (audience)

• Anyone interested in getting the most of out of Web 2.0 tools, and that would like to have an easy way of organising and accessing them
  * No limit on the number of participants, but please note that this is a BYOL (bring your own laptop) type of session
  * One and a half to two hours

What will they do when they get there? (activities)

• Explore different approaches to building PLEs (and try them)
  * Identify advantages and disadvantages of each one, and propose and discuss solutions
  * Set up their own PLEs using aggregators and browsers as "hubs"
  

What will you / they have at the end? (outputs)

• A general overview of PLEs and their potential role in learning
  * Hands-on experience on setting up PLEs using two types of Web 2.0 applications
  

Additional Background and Context

PLEs (Personal Learning Environments) are a relatively new concept, and there is increasing interest in the academic world in exploring its application in learning, both formal and informal. A number of efforts have been done towards agreeing on a general definition and approach to building PLEs; this session focuses on a framework proposed in 2008 by Torres, Edirisingha and Mobbs, and that has been succesfully tested in two different projects (PELICANS - Personal E-Learning In Communities And Networking Spaces, and HortDigital (DigitalOrchard).