PLE as outboard brain with a face
Cyborg
Originally uploaded by litmuse.
George Seimens notes an article in Wired which credits Cory Doctorow for coining the term outboard brain. Basically, we don't recall and can't directly do a lot of things we used to because we delegate it with technology (eg. recalling phone numbers, doing arithmetic). Many refer to their blogs as outboard brains.
I've just bookmarked this article under the tag PLE. Yes, del.icio.us is part of my outboard brain, but I don't reference it from my blog. I see a Personal Learning Environment as a private gateway to a range of private and public digital artefacts, connecting the relevant bits of your digital life and past for future retrieval.
Perhaps a PLE can be viewed as your outboard brain with a face.
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