• 24Jul
    Author: Katherine Pisana Categories: Mind Amplifying Tools Comments: 4

    I’ve been working on reinterpreting my PLE in order to get a deeper understanding of its nature. My initial approach was to group both formal and informal learning together. This time I’m going into a bit more detail.

    I’ve derived three sub-PLEs from my core map. The base categorisation is dependent upon context: the three sub-PLEs represent maps of my MA ODE PLE, my Professional PLE, and my Blog PLE. Strictly speaking, I suppose one could argue that the first represents a formal learning context, while the other two are much more self-imposed learning scenarios. Here they are below:

    My MA ODE PLE

    My MA ODE PLE (Click on the image to view full size)

    My Professional PLE (Click on the image to view full size)

    My Professional PLE (Click on the image to view full size)

    My Blog PLE (Click on the image to view full size)

    My Blog PLE (Click on the image to view full size)

    I’ve found that reinterpreting my initial PLE has allowed me to identify components that I had originally missed. For example, I had forgotten that podcasts were made available within my course materials. I think I forgot to consider this technology in the initial map because, as an overall concept, podcasts were interesting to me a couple of years ago but I quickly became overwhelmed by the amount of information available and eventually unsubscribed from the feeds. I think that the fact that I don’t like listening to the radio also has something to do with my disengagement from the podcasting community. And finally, and probably the most important reason why I don’t listen to podcasts, is because I’m not an auditory learner. I process information better when I can read it. I think that’s probably the most important lesson that podcasting technology has taught me. Some other components I forgot to include the first time around are MS Word and Google Scholar, along with a number of creative tools that I’ve added to my Blog PLE.

    This PLE drill-down also gave me a clearer picture of my dominant learning tools, namely, Firefox, which in turn means the Internet which then leads me to my laptop. The nodes that are connected by a green line are the only ones that can be accessed without the Internet.

    I’m not sure whether the real value of this activity is going to be in comparing my own reinterpretations, or eventually comparing my analyses with others’ reinterpretations…

4 Responses

WP_Floristica
  • Les Says:

    Thank you for this I like your three part model. Like you I keep remembering things that I have forgotten. Really this could be thought of as more of a journal and a one off exercise. You raise an interesting point about purpose. For me, along with other posts etc. my view of the interconnectedness of a PLE is very noticeable. In terms of my teaching I wonder what my students ‘maps’ would look like. Finding this out would be very useful and I am thinking about how best to achieve this. Les

  • Virtually Scholastic Says:

    This sparks an interesting idea about evaluating students’ skills prior to starting a course of study. Instead of getting them to take tests to evaluate their profiles, wouldn’t it be more interesting to have them create PLE maps instead? They could create them using whatever tools they like, which would, in itself be a test of their capabilities. Very interesting…

  • Chris kaplan Says:

    I wonder what might happen to your maps if you changed context to mean how your environment or what you were doing at the time impacted your learning environment.

    For instance a context might be ‘commuting’ where some of us auditory learners 😉 PLE’s would look different than while at home.

    Regards,

    chris

  • Virtually Scholastic Says:

    The physical environment would definitely be another interesting context on which to base the maps. I was thinking about that as I was conceptualising these, but I realised that as long as I have my laptop on me and I can access the Internet, the maps stay the same. For example, I’m in the UK at the moment, while a few days ago I was in California, and the maps haven’t changed.

    I supposed that not having my laptop while still having access to a connected computer might change them a bit though. I can also see how, if I were more of an auditory learner or even more of a mobile learner, the environmental context could potentially change the maps’ dimensions quite significantly.

    Thanks for your thoughts 🙂