Personal learning environments

From his posting, Stephen Downes sounds like he didn't really enjoy giving his talk on personal learning environments here in Boston yesterday, what with all that having to connect with "corporate e-learning industry types". I can understand that, but if I were Stephen I wouldn't give up, because his perspectives really are valuable in the context of work-based learning and there's a great deal of good thinking and practice that has arisen from a more educational context but which has real practical application in corporations. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that some corporations are a lot less conservative in their educational practice than universities.

Well, I was at the session and, although I'll admit to getting a little confused, did obtain some interesting insights. My main difficulty was in trying to come to terms with what a personalised learning environment might be over and above what I already have now. Donald Clark makes the point in his posting Why I love PLEs that, in his interpretation of the term, they are already easily available in the form of personalised home pages on Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc. Are these really PLEs? Is their primary function really personal learning? Perhaps Stephen was suggesting something much more, but I didn't quite understand what it was.

Perhaps I need to define the term for myself. My personalised learning environment includes many aspects of my knowledge network, including my browser favourites, my RSS feeds, my electronic documents and so on. But it's also non-digital and not easily captured in my browser. It includes my wife, friends and work colleagues, my tennis coach, my books, magazines and newspapers, the TV I watch, the films I see, the radio programmes that I listen to. I know it would be neater if these were all digitised and processed for my easy access, but I'm not so sure I don't prefer them as they are.