Examining your PLE

In this wired (wireless?) age, every educator can and should have their own personalized professional development plan. The sources of information you turn to--whether a colleague down the hall, or a colleague half a world away that you only meet up with online, or a library full of resources, or any online resources you rely upon--make up what might best be termed your personal learning environment (PLE.)

Your PLE is not the same as my PLE. We are unique individuals. We have different needs, different specific interests, different strengths and weaknesses.

That said, we might connect using the same tools, and you might share resources I find valuable, and vice-versa.

In the online learning space, there are a great many sources of information that can make up your PLE. You probably use a wide variety of tools as elements of your own personalize learning, right? Here is how I mapped out my own online PLE:

All of Us are Smarter than Any of Us

I'm taking two courses for my doctoral work this summer, and both are about online teaching and learning. One of them is titled "Social Network Learning," which makes it sound like it's all about Twitter and Facebook. To be fair, it is about Twitter and Facebook, but it's more about social presence in online learning, and making connections with other people as resources for learning.

I'm just beginning week two of the course, and as an assignment we were asked to find an image that represents our beginning conception of a personal learning environment (PLE.) After selecting an image, we had to write a brief explanation of our thinking about the image, and how it connects to our current thinking about PLE's.

Here is the picture I selected, and my reflection about it: