PLEs - what are we talking about here?

Donald Clark left the following comment on my posting about personal learning environments:

"The term PLE is, in itself, suspect. Personalised - OK but stating the obvious. Learning - well no, it's more about a two-way, working window - learning is at best a small part of it, a by product, not it's sole purpose. Environment - the PLE isn't the environment, the internet is."

It seems that what Donald is describing is essentially a customised home page, an individualised window onto the web, for all sorts of interesting purposes, only one of which is learning. I really can't conceive of anyone wanting a tool like this just for learning, except perhaps a full-time student, and even then it seems unlikely.

Unlike Donald, I can see a usefulness in the term 'personalised learning environment' but not if this is restricted to the digital domain. As I describe in my previous post on the topic:

"My personalised learning environment is a knowledge network that includes 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."

The Internet tool that Donald describes and the knowledge network that I describe above do overlap. There is a learning component to the former and an Internet-enabled portion to the latter:

This intersect may be what some people are advocating we call a PLE, perhaps with some extra features that I haven't yet understood. Whatever, could it be that this constitutes too small a portion of our interface with the Internet and too small a portion of the world in which we learn to be addressed as a separate entity?