PLE - Personal Learning Environment

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PLE - Personal Learning Environment

When I heard this acronym I did not know its meaning nor its usefulness. But soon I realized that it meant once more to sit down and reflect; this time on on my learning habits, both formal and informal. I never realized that my way of learning covers so a wide range of sources - I actually learn from many online tools (Wikipedia, online newsapapers, sites of music, youtube) that are much more easy to handle and faster to respond my requests. The map I developed with a software called FreeMind (it seemed more difficult to use than it actually was :)!) summarizes my actual way of learning; even though, I think that it will soon need to be updated because things are changing so fast recently! I divided it into six main groups - tools, physical space, reflection, people, travelling and formal learning - and then added pieces of information to each one. And the more I thought about it the more I added. It was amazing!

On the whole, learning is a lifelong process because you never really stop acquiring and the way I prefer is listening to music, watching movies and interacting with people, rather than spending a lot of time on books trying to widen my knowledge.

WIKI

Photo from flickr

During the course Edutech and Pbwiki have been two different kinds of collaborative writing. Collaborative writing means that many people work on the same web page by adding, modifying and removing information. We did it for educational purposes as we were supposed to learn using new tools and do an exchange with students of Tulane University in New Orleans.

The tulanepadova.pbwiki.com was both a language and a cultural exchange because we wrote posts in Italian and our peers answered in English; moreover, we created pages to show them our surroundings and our culture so that we could make comparisons. We had to follow some rules but on the whole we wrote about personal experiences and knowledge so it was not that difficult. Knowing that only our classmates and our American peers were going to have a look at them made it an interesting and a fruitful experience.

On the contrary, EduTech was very different. It is a public wiki by the University of Geneva focused on educational technology. When working on it we had to follow strict rules – on editing and copyright – and search the net for relevant information. This was the most difficult part because I knew few things about the topic – news feed aggregator – I chose to edit with Alida. This time I felt more free to cut and modify parts I did not like; because being a page that everybody can browse it should be well organized, precise and selective in content so that users can get what they want.

On the other hand, the pages on Pbwiki had a personal touch I did not like to change because people have different mental schemes so I just added some sentences here and there without reorganizing the whole page - I did it once and the following day it was as before! On the news feed aggregator page I made corrections of spelling and grammatical mistakes as there were many and I added the description to the Farmer’s model as it was not so clear – as my classmates suggested. This model was added by DSchneider – the administrator of EduTech – whose edit was useful but incomplete. This is the way that collaborative writing works… People give suggestions and others develop them! And it is very easy as Pbwiki's ad says: "Make a free wiki as easily as a peanut butter sandwich".