The WORLD is my SCHOOL (My PERSONAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT) #CCK12

Personal Learning Network (PLNs) are not simple graphical representations of connections that exists between an individual and his learning environment. Rather, ideally, PLNs are an articulated and much-analyzed interaction between the learner and his environment. It should spell out in simplified form, the elements of his environment that contributes to his development, presumably not just where he gets his information but also what affects his opinions, his point-of-view, and his critical thought.

Trying to map out a PLN is an important learning tool as it forces the individual to spell out, maybe not entirely and exhaustively, but it is a significant step for active learners to identify each contributor to his learning space and to recognize the contribution in both material content and intensity of these elements.

In this particular PLN that I tried to make for myself, I certainly recognize that the internet, and independently of it, news, are very important in shaping my opinions and my learning. Significant elements of the internet are Google, my first stop to learning about my environment, Wikipedia, and my most favorite social media tool currently, Facebook. As this PLN shows, I connect to friends and family mainly though facebook, through the phone (sms or voice) or through the computer (again either email, internet telephony or instant messengers).

I have also began to realize, with the help of this PLN, that my blog and comments made on them (despite being very few) are helpful feedback, either as an encouragement or as a check & balance from assenting and dissenting voices. Either way, comments help me learn.

Without having drawn this simple PLN, I would not have recognized many interactions in my life, both for social learning and academic learning, and I can say that at this age, social learning accounts heavier, and that it knows into another. The school is my world, because the world is my school!

PLEs and Adult Learning #CCK12

In my previous blog on PLE, I posit that PLEs require a certain level of maturity and discernment in order to be useful. PLEs will only be a web of information sources in the hands of a novice. A more discerning individual can, on his/her own, recognize that connections are not the end-all, but rather, there are levels and layers to these connections; that some are more useful than others, and some are more prominent than others.

In Adult Learning, the audience is usually more mature, but at the same time, they lack the tool to understand the learning landscape, particularly those involving the internet (unlike that of the digital natives). This is when PLEs become a very important tool for them to map their resources of learning - be they virtual resources or physical ones.

I suppose that my argument here is that teaching Adult Learners (and in most cases, discerning young ones too) to reflect on their learning landscape through imaging their own individual PLE and writing it down is a very powerful tool for learning. It empowers the adult learner as they begin to navigate all the available learning resources at their disposal.

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.