PLEs and the necessary construct to learn using PLEs #CCK12

Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) is part of the natural evolution of learning resources that is being thrust upon us with the rapid development of the internet.

No longer is it necessary to store all the information in one physical location (the libraries) and go to temples of wisdom to hear the priests that spout unquestioned Bible-truths (universities and their lecturers). The internet has democratized information and brought tremendous (and way-too-much) of it in the hands of learners. It is with this premise that the centers of learning have lost control on the way information travels (from teachers to students) and put those controls on the hands of the learners themselves. 

PLEs, as the name suggests, are highly individualized and do not subscribe to a specific dogmatic definition. It also does not have a specific framework, despite attempts of academics to put structure into it (as they always are wont to do). 

Students are now more liberated than ever, and if we are to direct their learning, it is not through controlling the traffic of information that we need to help them. Academic institutions can no longer claim to be the providers of information, the internet has usurped that role successfully. The centers of teaching need not teach information, but rather how to locate them in the pool of information (information search) and how to separate the good ones from the bad (information literacy). 

Digital natives are good at finding information in the net, they were after all born and bred there. They can access the net and search information. The big danger to this is, digital natives equate successful information search as learning. It has been a common experience for me as a teacher to receive a submission of hodge-podge and mish-mash of information from everywhere put together pretending to be a paper from a student who believes that more information is better.

Information literacy is one of the biggest skill that the academia has to impart to students of the present, as transmitting information is to the past. It involves the ability of the learner to discern the which information is more reliable than others, which one is more trustworthy and which one is more useful to the argument at hand.

For PLEs to be effective platforms of individual learning, the 21st century learner has to be imparted a construct of the necessary skills, one that the academia can help the students with to become more effective learners and contributors to the greater community:

1. Locating data - effective data searches, knowing pertinent key words

2. Information literacy - evaluating data and sources for reliability 

3. Reframing information - ability to find data that is suitable and to process raw information to suit the argument (not to be mistaken for tampering with data)

4. Reflecting on the learning and the process of arguing an opinion

5. Disseminating that learning in a confident manner, a confidence that is rooted on discerned reflection.