By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Mobiles, Micro Content and Personal Learning Environment
Critical reflections on personal learning environments. "I am pretty critical about the concept of PLE," wrtes Teemu Leinonen. "I am critical about it because it doesn't put in a center community, but emphasizes content." I personally think that community as such is vastly overrated - community (group) implies a sort of conformity with which I am not comfortable. But content is also vastly overrated, so Leinonen. What do I think should be emphasized? Choice. Control. Autonomy. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Dave'S Top 10 Musings On the Encouragement of Community in Multi-User Virtual Environments
Some interesting thoughts on the topic. I don't agree with some of the musings - "There should be shared or mutually supported goals," for example (why do people always insist on shared goals? meaning, of course, their own goals, that everyone should share). Others make good sense to me, like "Members need to be able to control the presentation of their identity." Ten muses in all, all of which are worth, um. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Open Complimenting Closed?
Link to a discussion on the linkage between personal leaning environments and learning management systems - "open complementing closed". The idea, writes Fraser, is that the PLE is being used to supplement the weakenesses of the learning management system - and specifically, personalization. But there are various aspects to customization and personalization, and it's not exactly clear you can just join some web 2.0 apps to an LMS. Via Marion Manton. Also worth thinking about is the personal learning network as described in The Illuminated Dragon. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. My Personal Learning Environment
Interesting post not only touting the concept of the personal learning environment (PLE) but also describing how hers is built from existing applications. Good stuff. Via Brent Schlenker. Related: Clive Shepherd summarizes my talk on PLEs at the eLearning Guild conference in Boston. Also, Stephen Powell on the talk. What I am trying to describe is more than just an aggregation of current desktop apps - it's a bit like the digital lifestyle aggregator described by Marc Canter, but I don't seem to be able to convey what happens when all the parts are actually linked together. More...