The results of this study demonstrate the potential for Personal Learning Environments as a tool for Lifelong Learning, linked to communities of practice. Personal Learning Environments can extend access to educational technology to everyone wanting to organise their own learning. PLEs can include and bring together all learning, including informal learning, workplace learning, learning from the home, learning driven by problem solving and learning motivated by personal interest as well as learning through engagement in formal educational programmes.

Source: Pontydysgu - Bridge to Learning

Information overload? Not anymore. Single Page Aggregators are the new wave of web 2.0 portals and directories. Instead of aggregating web sites, the Single Page Aggregators track the feeds from those sites.

Until now Popurls and Original Signal only tracked a few popular topics. Recently Alltop covering a much broader range of topics, was launched by Guy Kawasaki, who wants to change the world by aggregating RSS For The Masses .

Alltop will certainly appeal to those who need an easy way to follow many topics or don’t use yet a feed reader.

I have my own Single Page Aggregator at emapey | FeedRaider where I can quickly scan the feeds from the Education sites I follow. You can create yours too. Now, by using Alltop, I can also follow feeds in many other topics.

emapey | FeedRaider and Alltop are both part of my PLE (Personal Learning Environment)

The Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies is building a Top 100 Favorites List of Tools used for personal working and learning or for creating and delivering learning solutions. Jane Hart invited me to contribute. I submitted, then, my own list of Top 10 Personal Favorite Tools

Moving towards a PLE from the current model in which formal learning is very thoroughly entrenched in Learning Management systems will require considerable evolution of ideas and technologies and adoption of innovation. Innovation guru Everett Rogers noted that relative advantage is the largest factor in the adoption of innovations. Of course the relative advantage is contextualized and dependent upon the perspective and need of individual users (learners, teachers, technical support, administrators etc). Thus, the listing of advantages and disadvantages below needs to be contextualized from these and other particular viewpoints.

Nonetheless, I attempt to overview the major advantages and disadvantages of an educational system based on the familiar LMS versus an emergent one based on a PLE

Source: Virtual Canuck

A good set of Linkages should make it easier for its owner to learn and to work. Naturally, it would facilitate finding things, finding people, expressing things, collaborating, asking for advice, getting help, finding relevant information, interacting with groups, being active in supporting a variety of communities, book-marking for subsequent retrieval, archiving both personal and private information, accessing generic solutions, publishing material to the web, sending and receiving messages, working together on projects, keeping abreast of new developments, initiating and taking part in conversations, maintaining a private stash of documents and passwords, publishing a public identity page, archiving material in a living portfolio, learning to learn, and more.

Source: Informal Learning Blog

Why is the concept of a personal learning environment, and potentially even a PLE software application or framework, especially relevant today?

Source: Sims Learning Connections

A PLE is a combination of the formal and informal tools and processes we use to gather information, reflect on it and do something with it, which is essentially what we mean when we talk about learning.

Note that I mention that informal learning is a big part of the PLE. By some estimates, 75-80% of on-the-job learning is done informally–that is, outside of a classroom-based (physical or virtual), highly structured learning situation. With the growth of the Internet and a variety of second generation web tools, the ability to construct a personal learning environment that emphasizes and leverages informal learning has really exploded.a PLE is a combination of the formal and informal tools and processes we use to gather information, reflect on it and do something with it, which is essentially what we mean when we talk about learning.

Source: The Bamboo Project

Mohamed Amine Chatti posted last month a list of Interesting Links and Blogposts on Personal Learning Environments (PLE). He plans to regularly update that list. I contributed by adding some links to PLE and PKMS aticles I thought were missing.