Personal Learning Environments

 So if you're reading this as part of the Jigsaw activity, some key points to know about PLEs, as discussed by Dabbagh and Kitsantas article Personal Learning Environments, social media, and self-regulated learning are: 

  • It's a new construct in e-learning literature that is rooted in social media and is gaining traction as an effective tool for students to self-regulate their learning. 
  • PLEs "are built on externally hosted (in-the-cloud) web 2.0 tools and services. 
  • One of the main tenets of PLEs is that they enable students to not only self-regulate their learning, but use existing tools and communities to essentially "package" their learning in a way that makes sense. 
  • PLEs allow for greater personalization and ownership
  • A nice way to integrate formal and informal learning 
  • A key feature of PLEs is learners creating, and subsequently developing, an online identity where the environment itself helps the learner cue in to what is being shared and with whom. 
One of my biggest concerns as I was reading this article was that PLEs are not for everyone, so I was pleasantly surprised to get to the end of the article and see the authors explicitly note that because PLEs demand a high level of self-regulated learning, not all learners will benefit from this approach, even within the context of higher education. However, I've had so many students who would have benefitted from an approach like this, and I wish it's something I would have had more knowledge of when I was in the classroom. 


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