Personal Learning Environments

What is a personal learning environment, or PLE, and why should we consider them a valuable pedagogical tool to be used in any classroom? After reading Personal Learning Environments, social media, and self-regulated learning: A natural formula for connecting formal and informal learning, here are some of my thoughts on the subject. 

A personal learning environment is the individual's choice to use the web 2.0 world for personal research, collaboration, and presentation of their discoveries.  "Rubin, 2010, McGloughlin and Lee, 2010 posit that PLEs empower students to take charge of their own learning prompting them to select tools and resources to create, organize and package learning content to learn effectively and efficiently."

PLEs support a more informal learning environment to supplement the formal classroom, and research shows that students need both formal and informal learning to be successful. This semester has been my first experience utilizing social media as part of my learning experience and it has helped me to keep my focus on the material outside of specific "school time".  It reminds me of an english class I took one summer during undergrad, Literature of the Western World, where because of the short semester, we were reading an average of 80 pages per night and having quizzes everyday. It was an immersion experience, that allowed us to soak in the subject matter without ever really taking a break from it. I am feeling a similar way now as we do forced recall of the materials we are reading and listening to and watching as we comment and connect with one another through social media. It is exciting to feel like we are part of something bigger than ourselves with the hashtags, badges, and blog commentary. 

This quote really resonated with me as a an aspect of what Dr. Dennen is helping us achieve through this course - "Teaching students to become effective self-regulated learners may help them acquire basic and complex personal knowledge management skills that are essential for creating, managing, and sustaining PLEs using a variety of social media.

Towards the end of the journal article, there is a framework for using social media to support self-regulated learning in Personal Learning Environments that I found really useful to understand how to incorporate social media into the classroom from a teacher's perspective. Check it out!

Resource:

Dabbagh, N., & Kitsantas, A. (2012). Personal Learning Environments, social media, and self-regulated learning: A natural formula for connecting formal and informal learning. The Internet and Higher Education, 15(1), 3–8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2011.06.002