Deliberations

This was the question that was posed to me in an email by an IT academic. Here is my response:

But your question is odd. A PLE is not necessarily a single piece of software. I presume you have read my 2006 article. In it, I talk about a “facility”. What does that word mean? It is a something that makes something else easier to achieve (the root word of facility is facile, which means easy). Think of the word “catalyst”.

Maybe it’s just a disciplined way of organising your life and connecting to others and their activities using a dynamic set of tools. Maybe it’s your relationships with others and to institutions, as a denizen of a network. This is what George Siemens and Stephen Downes are on about.

For some people, iGoogle is enough. They attach widgets that connect them to what they think is important. For some academic researchers, Zotero is their focus. For me, my RSS aggregator is crucial. So is my blog for archiving my thoughts and concerns. For [us at our universities], it’s about access and personal archiving of resources behind the VLE walled garden. Each of those scenarios identifies different sources of knowledge and participation.

So your starting point should not be the PLE, but rather what is important to your lifelong learning. In particular, you should think beyond institutional boundaries. Once you identify the kinds of things that are important, then the question comes, how can you cope with all this? What tools can help? I can’t answer that for you. That’s why it’s personal.

Here is another approach. Think about something you experienced or learned perhaps two years ago, but it’s now a vague memory. Thought experiment: if you had had an ideal behaviour/facility/tool then, what could you have done then so that you could reliably ask an arbitrary question today about that experience, and retrieve an artefact about it that supports an answer?

Hope that helps,