Having alienated half of my blog and Twitter network in pursuit of learning how the more advanced among us do things, I wanted to share a few updates.

• D’Arcy updated his PLE post with a TouchGraph diagram showing how his blog serves as the hub of his learning network. Feel free to ignore the part where he puts the Canadian style smackdown on me and I do a lot of apologizing. I want my friend back!
• Alan chose two interesting metaphors to talk about his PLE (or whatever)… his tools and connections as a kind of learning network cloud with Heisenbergian effects and an anatomical model of core, heartbeat, nervous system, etc. I like them both– the first because I agree about the indeterminacy and approximation, the second because it connects on a more visceral (no pun intended) level.
• Martin Weller has a couple of good posts: one looking at where we stand now with the idea of the PLE and another that proposes a continuum model for making sense of the VLE/PLE ideas that are out there.
• Nancy White shares her ‘configuration’ tag in del.icio.us with which communities of practice have tagged their ‘individual technology configuration’– maybe that’s a neutral term that would work better than PLE?
• Michele Martin shares juicy details of her PLE, including paper based components. Fascinating. I like her model of Gather/Process/Act.
• Jared Stein asks a question that Michele partly answers, namely: “should definitions of one’s PLE to be limited to the digital space, or are physical tools and utilities fair game?”
• George Siemens has discussed the concept before and does so again.
• Tony Karrer links to many other places where this conversation has been happening…

If nothing else, names and such aside, it is clear that there is something being addressed– at least in part– by these conversations that is important. An itch is being scratched! I’m not hung up on the definitions for two reasons:

1. I can’t point to “the PLE” but I can point to many examples of “a PLE” just as I can point to many examples of blogs despite the term ‘blog’ being arguably meaningless.
2. I’ve never really understood the idea of the PLE as being directly in opposition to– much less aligned structurally with– the LMS. I think this greatly influences how different people view the term (i.e. the idea of the PLE as one monolithic entity replacing the other).

[It's turning into one of those days already. I managed to convey exactly the wrong thing to D'Arcy, the one person who actually gave me an answer! That wasn't my intent... I paraphrase part of the comment I left for him here in an effort to be clearer than I was at 3:30 this morning:

I intended [my mention of his PLE response in this post] as appreciation given that these aren’t easy things to explicate! The last paragraph [in this post] was the only point where I had [your response] in mind. The mention of your “etc” wasn’t a jab, it was just a note that these parts I/we/you take for granted are often the ones that most mystify newbies. There’s a whole lot packed into the “communities, etc” part of things. I wasn’t intending to reject your answer, I was saying “that’s good; I think there’s a lot more good stuff hidden in that other bit too.”]

I’m interested in your PLE. I’m not looking to package the idea up for export so an educator– particularly one who is new to teaching online and/or new to being a participant in social networks of peers and/or one who has grown up with their educational feet bound by the tight shoes of the LMS– can open up some magic box and suddenly be operating at the level of someone who has spent years honing their methods and building/whittling their tool set. But a model to get started with– as a few have attested to in the comments to my original post– is a valuable thing… and I know from my ongoing experience that there are always new specifics to be learned from those who know more than me.

Alan might have a hard time knowing what it means to describe such a thing as the PLE, but who wouldn’t love to have a few hours to watch over his shoulder and see how he does things in that personal environment of his? Why do I listen when Alan shares story telling tools or D’arcy talks about feed readers (or cameras) or Scott makes note of a tool for mashing up the information streams? Why do we (educational technology people) spend so much time and effort discussing our choice of tools and resources and the way we use them when we get together? I’m not talking here about the “air” or “the people,” but about specific choices. The world isn’t just full of abstract tools and vague people, it’s full of flickr and zooomr and Google Reader and BlogBridge and blonde telecasters and at least 50 storytelling tools. I wouldn’t dream of responding to Alan’s story about his guitar that “music’s not about the instrument” because I know that he knows that. At some higher level, music is not the instrument, photography is not the camera, and networks are people… but at the everyday operational level, and certainly at the level that we can hope to help teach others and get them started on a path to individuality, they are exactly about those things.

Nancy White has referred to the concept of “learning over the shoulder” and this is what I am attempting to facilitate– a way for people new to all of this to learn over the shoulder of their more experienced colleagues. I’m trying to help people who see the web as a passive source of information start to see the power in participation in a social network and in investing some time in learning some proficiencies in doing so.

D’Arcy notes that a PLE is “organic, dynamic, responsive, and intensely, individually unique.” Sure it is. But not at the beginning. At the beginning it takes a group of tools and resources, an initial selection of people to connect to, and some basic ideas of what the heck they do with all of it. And even D’Arcy’s refined, crafted, personal PLE has in it specific things employed using specific techniques that anyone who wants to educate would be crazy not to want to know about.

I find it odd that educators, of all people, would work so hard in service of the notion that teaching others is impossible. All a PLE is, to my way of understanding, is a particular, personal selection of tools, contacts, and methods. Many of us are still at a stage in our evolution that we can learn much from knowing what tools others use, how they use them, and who they make contact with.

Yes, I’m frustrated at the irony that I am trying to bring the discussion of the PLE down to the practical level but being rebuffed largely due to objections to some higher-level abstraction that I’m really not that interested in. But I refuse to give up– not least because of comments by people like Shannon and Chris, who make it clear that those who are learning about the ideas I put under the rubric of “PLE” (I class myself in that group still– I remain intensely interested in how other educators are creating, using, and maintaining their learning networks… if I weren’t, I wouldn’t be in the job I am) can benefit from the discussions and models. And let’s remember that there are a lot of people out there who are essentially using nothing at all right now! I’m constantly meeting with educators who are just learning about social bookmarking, feed reading, wiki editing, etc. They want to know how to get started… those who have been doing it a while want to know how to get better… and those who are “experts” want to know what their peers are up to.

So, I ask again– what does your PLE look like? What tools do you favor? What tips, tricks and advice can you give others on using them? Who and what do you follow? What information resources are your favorite? D’Arcy took a good shot at it, though he left the most interesting areas out with a very telling “etc” that kind of demonstrates the assumptions people who are “into it” make that mystify those who are still learning about all this stuff. Your choices are personal and idiosyncratic. It’s not an easy question. That’s why it’s so valuable to answer it.

[I've taken the advice of a good friend-- who is usually right in these matters-- and trimmed away a bunch of the ranty (and more importantly unfair) bits of this post, though I'm sure it will live on in RSS streams forever.]

To discuss the PLE beyond the abstractions that lead people who agree with one another to argue anyway demands coming to some contingent and admittedly insufficient shared condition. It’s just like talking about “blogs” or “critical thinking”– we assume enough of a shared definition to make it productive. When I talk about the PLE, I am talking about these things:

1. an understanding of the tools and applications available for educators and students to connect with one another in both two-way and one-way relationships for teaching and learning
2. understanding the methods of participation in their network, from the technological to the semantic

Every single day I see good people, who haven’t any real framework for how to learn, being thrown into the deep end of the pool and expected to just swim. Sometimes it works. Most often it results in people that hate water, hate swimming, and hate the one who threw them in. The majority of educators have no idea what resources are available to them and never leave their email client or their default MSN page. Thus, I have found it useful to sit people down and model for them the tools and techniques for networking. This often includes holding them by the hand while they sign up to follow and participate in particular groups and networks. Many people have absolutely no idea that their network can extend beyond their email box and their passive browsing. I consider giving educators a leg into my network to be doing them a favor, it provides them an introduction and a starting place. I know others are doing the same when I regularly see “Welcome X to Twitter” or “Comment on new blogger X’s first post.”

Modeling and engaging in practice are fundamental how I teach. I am clear with folks that what I’m modeling, the things I show them and have them try, these are but first steps in a process of continual building and refinement that can last a happy lifetime. It’s like learning to write. Many great writers have noted the powerful learning that comes from writing in the style of, and even mimicking, other writers. After that, the novice writer will naturally choose their path and more fully act as an independent agent. But that can be a long and intimidating process, and there are worse fates than getting the initial assistance of being connected with others from whom they can learn, others who have, in some ways, already “been there.”

When I look at Ray’s picture of his PLE it’s not just a picture, it’s a start at a representation that I and others can learn from, from someone who has already been there. If an educator comes to me for help in figuring out how to negotiate this incredibly complex and chaotic environment, this kind of diagram is invaluable in helping them start to form a bigger picture. It is often one or two items that seem screamingly obvious to the person sharing their PLE that turn out to be the sparks that put another on the path to information nirvana.

I can’t remain as blasé as some about Blackboard’s recent win in court and the obscene patent they have been granted (as usual, Stephen Downes has a good roundup of reactions to the decision). Here’s why:

Whether it should or will matter later, the LMS matters now. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m all about getting out from under the thumb of the LMS. That being said, my own institution is– like many others– pretty tightly wedded to Blackboard and is likely to remain so for quite some time. It doesn’t matter if I agree with it, the situation is simply part of the context. I’m also relatively pessimistic about how long it will take before a significant amount of instruction at institutions– particularly those that use Blackboard now– moves outside of the LMS. If it does… and there are no guarantees that it will.

The LMS can improve! Given the reality of institutional bonds and decision-making around technology, I can’t just quietly overlook removing one of the only significant forces stimulating the already slow improvement of Blackboard. And it can improve… perhaps not to the point that it could challenge the much better idea of the PLE, but that leaves a lot of room for positive change.

A better LMS actually helps my (our) cause. Ironically, by getting better it would be a lot easier to guide faculty toward new, superior tools. For example, I can just imagine how much more readily an educator who had experience with a good discussion tool in Blackboard would consider and accept a move to more open, social systems. In fact, I don’t have to imagine… I’ve seen it happen with analogous situations. The only way most institutions will change away from Blackboard (or resist it) is if they have a base of vocal, successful educators exerting appropriate pressure.

You can’t expect rational business decisions to follow irrational ones. I don’t buy the argument that the bad taste coming from this decision will spur institutions to move beyond the LMS. The reasons for adopting and keeping a system like Blackboard have very little to do with good teaching or pedagogical affordances (particularly this late in the game), and much to do with economic pragmatics, utilitarian information technology-centric feature sets, and systemic inertia. Expecting a rational decision to switch away from a product when the things that spurred its adoption and powered its retention remain largely– if not wholly– unchanged is wishful thinking at best.

I’d like this decision to be something other people have to worry about, but it isn’t. I’d like the decision not to matter– in line with my inclinations and general philosophy– but it does. At least for me and my institution… and I suspect many others in a similar position.

 Will Richardson and Stephen Downes have noted Danah Boyd’s interesting post about social networks and social tools in educational settings. The distinction is an important, but not a new one, stemming from the traditional nomenclature of YASNS (yet another social network) and socially enabled applications. The two come somewhat closer together with applications like Facebook (particularly given FB’s extensibility), but I the gap is fairly wide.

A couple of notes, though:

Higher education is different. College students are more likely to benefit from the traditionally social applications, not just because of their relative maturity (save the smart remarks), but because the classroom communities in higher ed are generally weaker, if they exist at all. Sometimes this is a matter of logistics– class size and frequency of meeting– but it’s also simply a function of a different kind of population.

Student services are different… for higher education at least. While we all want to avoid creating a creepy treehouse, I think the real future for social networks in education lies in the realm of student services (and extended activities, obviously, such as clubs, sports, alumni groups, etc). I’m not convinced, even in higher ed, of efforts to mold a social network application like Facebook or MySpace into an instructional space, but using those networks to provide information that students need about services and activities– in a way that isn’t intrusive or creepy– is a logical and growing service.

Familiarity doesn’t have to breed contempt. While I believe educators can build a stronger network more quickly with social applications like Twitter, blogging and social bookmarking, social network applications provide an easy point from which to begin exploring what is, for many, a completely new world of communication and participation. Many groups (in my case publishers, presses, poetry and writing groups) find applications like Facebook an easy and amenable place to quickly create a communication presence, again providing an easy entrance for educators and a quick means to establish some basic, useful connections.

Social network <> Social networking. Keep the distinctions clear, if only for clarity in operation. In this context, social networks or social network applications refer to a relatively specific kind of application: those which facilitate social interactions and in which those social interactions are the primary coin of the realm. Facebook and MySpace are the most prominent, to which you can add Orkut, Friendster, etc. This is different from social applications or social tools, in which the social interactions facilitated are directed toward a social object– a bookmark, a blog post, a wiki page, a document, a photo, etc. Social tools are tools like flickr, del.icio.us, blogs, wikis, and a kajillion-trillion others. Social networking occurs with both kinds of application and all can comprise part of a personal learning network, but social tools are not the same as social network applications in this discussion.

The idea of network evaluation keeps finding its way into my thoughts lately. By network evaluation I mean the proposal that– if we take Connectivism and personal learning/living networks at all seriously– the learning network itself should be part of what is directly assessed. If it is really important to us that our students learn to implement their own personalized environment for learning that goes beyond the bounds of individual classes and even institutions, then the quality of the environment that they create, as a whole, has to be a significant part of our assessment activities.

A few things I’m learning about here have relevance, though all the dots aren’t yet connected.

First is the growing idea of socio-technical network analysis. Essentially, traditional social network analysis involves quantification of a homogeneous network made up of people (nodes) and their connections (links). Non-human nodes are only present in the sense that the people they are presumed to represent are included. Socio-technical network analysis involves heterogeneous networks in which nodes include technical nodes such as databases, expert-systems, knowledge-bases, etc. As educators we know that personal learning networks are made up of this kind of heterogeneous network… even the basic triad of educational interactions (students, instructors, curriculum) included a non-human node.

Awareness of the expanded network brings new focus to bear on metrics. As I asked in the beginning, how do we measure a network’s effectiveness? Traditional social network analysis has focused on quantification of staightforward attributes such as network density, interconnectedness, number and speed of communications between nodes, etc. Now strong movements are being made towards trying to figure out new metrics, recognizing that the different kinds of links will require thinking about the quality of links.

Second, some very new research on Open Source development project communication highlights the need for some new methods of analysis: the accepted notions that a high-density of communication (that more communication that involves more of the group) and strong administrator communication and connections leads to successful projects (in terms of quality releases) seem to be wrong. It’s very counter-intuitive– though it’s easy, faced with the contradictions, to theorize why– but the numbers are unequivocal. How this relates to other kinds of social networks where similar assumptions are made is yet to be determined.

These last two facts are important for educators. As practitioners we are, as usual, ahead of the research. We already know that networks are heterogeneous; we already know that there are different qualities of links, where a “good” link between a student and a quality resource can be worth many times the number of “poor” links. Likewise, while it is true that more communication within a learning network is usually a good thing, increased density can also be a sign of problems: inefficiencies in access, poor communication requiring too many transactions or repetitions, etc. If the links are all high quality, then theoretically a graph of that network could look very sparse.

Analysis of networks is what makes assessment possible. But discussions of network analysis tend to center around those quantitative, objective measurements. Socio-technical network analysis is interesting because it assumes (explicitly or implicitly as the case may be) that a significant portion of new metrics will be subjective metrics of quality that will likely be impossible to mechanize. Which means that as important as personal living and learning networks might be to learning, educators become even more important for making sure those networks are high quality. And knowing that the measures of quality don’t have to be composed in a way suitable to turning them into machine heuristics means there is hope that the research will result in findings that are actually useful for those of us engaged in the day-to-day work of teaching and facilitating connected learning and learners.

I hereby decree that PLE and PLN now refer to personal _living_ environments and networks. Cinching the borders in narrowly to the word “learning” brings along too much historical baggage, pinning the idea of learning down to a discrete, particular time and process that we endure only as long as necessary before resuming our journey somewhere else.

We need to help students stop thinking about education as something they get done and help them understand learning as a continual lifelong process.

In the archaic– and continuing– model of higher education it is possible to discard the activities and paraphernalia of learning. With more or less nostalgia, “former” students can recall the strange rituals of library-going, note-taking, research, and information management and resource management that they took part in the same way they more or less fondly remember dorm life, cafeteria food, and co-eds. Except for those continuing in academia, where some aspects of being a learner continue in (often rather) abstracted ways, the only thing part of the experience that remains “active” is an institutional email address and machines generating billing statements for student loans.

In the emerging model, students learn to navigate, assess, construct and participate in a living network that comprises the heart of their learning network and they take that with them when their time as part of any particular institution’s offerings come to a change.

Though all of these activities have their parallels in later work and life, few former students (again, outside of those who become career academics) will again need to perform traditional research activities or face a pile of assigned reading and even fewer will will be authoring papers or cramming for exams. But if we do our jobs properly they will be participants in professional communities; they will have a desire for self-expression; they will be members of the pro-sumer class. They may not need to figure out MLA format and how to format footnotes in word, but they will need to know how to blog, wikify and twitter. They may not have to create an annotated bibliography, but they will need to know how to marshal and share resources with del.icio.us- and flickr-like systems.

“Going to school” is an activity that has a life and dies; learning is a continuing process. Enrollments and degree programs terminate; personal living networks accompany learners through life– the ultimate educational institution– serving as companion, confidante, and oracle alike.

Phaedrus elaborates:

Design and Development - or Is it soup yet?
According to what I think I have learned about designing online courses and teaching in general, three types of interaction, student-student, student-teacher, and student-content, are the focal points for developing instruction.

There are actually two more — teacher-environment, and student-environment. We tend to ignore the environmental issues when dealing with the classroom based courses because we’re so famliar with them. Automaticity makes it seem invisible most of the time, but it’s obvious in the beginning of the year or when there have been changes in the building from semester to semester. People are wandering around lost and not knowing what’s going on. The environmental interactions online are more apparent when you move into environments that are not familiar — like a new school, or online. If the affordances of the environment are not the same as what you’re used to, then that interaction becomes visible — largely thru frustration.

It is interesting that we (or at least “I” and the way I interpret much of what I am reading) tend to either ignore the educational environment or reference it as a mere byproduct of the traditional triangle of interactions. The idea of the PLE is one that allows us to both explicitly address this important, overlooked area and bring at least some of it back into the realm of intentionality. Not control– or at least not only and not complete control– of the environment, and not just creating a learning environment, but facilitating the students’ creation of their own environments, a critical part of learning communities and a foundation of the new third places, etc.

One of my students who is just learning about web feeds and feed reading commented to me that she liked the “fluidity” of the medium, then noted:

I found that several of the
converted” track 80-some feeds a day. The thought made my head hurt, but the reality is that I will probably be just as “engaged” as soon as I get my favorites linked.

This triggered the firing of many synapses, connecting together a variety of dots from my own social network: Brian Lamb’s recent post about a conference that completely escaped his radar (at the time), Bryan Alexander’s Twit about social networks as triads that lead me to his post on the subject referencing Stephen Downes’ catch of Ton Zylstra’s visualization and Jyrie Engesrom’s writing on social objects. This dark path lit up when I came across Gardner Campbell’s post on Distributed Cognition that illustrates the power of the social network and ends with sound advice:

Oh yes, and the moral of the story: link out to other bloggers early and often. Something about casting your bread upon the waters…

It’s taken me longer to copy and paste links than it did to follow that path. It will take me far longer to write this entry than it did to read all of the entries. But it has already been immensely valuable to my thinking and will influence some projects I am working on.

The thing is– and this is what is so hard to convey to others– this kind of eye-opening experience happens nearly every day. If it didn’t, I couldn’t keep working in this field, where the difficulties and apathy and institutional lethargy vastly outnumber the tangible moments of success. And it has nothing to do with being a super voracious informavore, with working extra hard to keep up, or with spending all of my free time working. While occasionally guilty of the first, my information consumption habits encompass many other areas outside of work. Moreover, I don’t even try to keep up, and when I work from home it’s on other work that isn’t reflected here.

There’s too much information and always has been… it was just that in the past it was easier to ignore the deep waters of the unknown because they were harder to access, often locked away behind gatekeepers of various kinds, and generally were static resources that we fetched at certain times for certain purposes. Very little information came to us except that which we directly asked for. But the environment has changed dramatically.

In addition to the kinds of resources we’ve always had, we have the powerful ability to tap into the vital knowledge in the heads of our colleagues, idols, and students. Our “collection” is no longer just, or mostly, pointers to reservoirs but an infosphere in constant flux, fed by flows from sources into and around our immediate locus of need and desire. I constantly refer to Downes’ metaphor of resources, information, and learning as water flowing through the network, not something we think about capturing constantly and storing in our cupboards, but something we turn on and use when we need it.

As I told my student, learning to stimulate and manage this flow is the information literacy skill of the age. The secrets to doing so aren’t secrets at all:

First, and perhaps hardest, we have to learn to be OK with not “keeping up” in the traditional sense. People worry about 20, or 50, or 100 web feeds because they are considering them in the old frame of scarcity and control– as resources to consume all at once lest they be lost. If they have unread feeds, unseen sites, unheard podcasts, unabsorbed articles in their environment they feel uneasy, even agitated. It isn’t that there weren’t all these undigested items before, they just didn’t know about them. This agitation can be paralyzing. I liken it to my own fear of swimming in deep water, which is an extension of my fear of heights. Though I know how to swim and I never need to go more than a few feet deep to do so, I have a hard time with water more than five feet deep. I’d rather stay in the boat and ignore those depths despite there being no rational or logical basis to my fear: swimming in 4 feet of water is no different than swimming in 250 feet. Too many feel this way in the sea of information– better to turn away from the depths than jump in. For some reason we expect to be complete Olympic swimmers when treading water and occasionally dog-paddling are perfectly OK.

Keeping up in the information age doesn’t mean absorbing everything in your immediate vicinity, it means keeping your network tuned and fresh so that the information is there when you need it. The important things find their way to you because they carry some of the energy of other participants.

The second key “secret” is an echo of Gardner’s refrain, and what makes the network effects carrying the important information to us work: you have to be an active participant in that network. What you put into the network– directly and indirectly– shapes the network to your needs and makes possible the reflection and amplification that brings the important stuff to you. Blog posts, twitters, information linked in socially enabled applications like flickr, del.icio.us and stumbleupon, facebook updates, comments, wiki edits… whatever methods make sense in your environment will work, but only if you are engaged. Trying to be an old-school passive consumer in a participation based network is like traveling to a new place and then holing up in your hotel watching the same programs and eating food from the same restaurant chains… you’re a consumer rather than a resident and you’re not only going to miss out on the most important happenings, but you’ll never even know about them.

There’s a lot of talk about Personal Learning Environments right now, and rightly so. But PLEs are not just for students any more than learning is just for students. Educators are faced with extra demands: not only do they need to learn to create and participate in their own social network– essentially a PLE– for professional advantages, but they will face daunting hurdles when helping their students in this critical area if they have no experience with it themselves.