These are mainly notes interspersed with a few of my comments and reflections on a 'PLE Experts' Meeting held in Manchester on 6 June.   As I type a PLE general event is on the way, which I'm sure will be a very stimulating gathering and it would have been nice to stay on, but I felt I needed to be in the office today.   

I came to this event not really knowing what to expect and as my normal work is in running a centrally hosted VLE, I was wondering what realistically might be of use on my return.    Anyway, at the very least, this trip, only my second to Manchester, afforded me the opportunity to visit for the first time Wat Charoen Bhavana, a new Thai temple that seems to be right in the middle of warehouse/factory district in the NW of the city. I could save the University a hotel bill, yet be well fed in body and mind!   Mind you, it's appropriate to observe local customs, which means getting up early to join chanting - I actually rose at 5am. :-)

The meeting actually proved quite informative as there was considerable knowledge in the group, quite diverse backgrounds and perceptions with no-one claiming to know exactly what is meant by 'PLE'!   Furthermore, it was useful to understand a little the background in which CETIS is working.   I reckon most there were more engaged with 'PLE'-related projects than myself, so I was mainly just listening.  I didn't take that many notes (but some others did and you'll doubtless see these online). 

I jotted down 2-3 phrases for most participants, with a few comments added here and there.  I've grouped things under headings I've made up to illustrate the very broad (and discursive) range of subject matter.   There's so much here that I can do little more than provide bullet points!

Philosophy

• model of social reality (Heidegger, Fernando Flores, Cybernetics, etc..)
  
• deeper engagement, historically situated issues

Education/Pedagogy

• What is the input from pedagogy in all this?  Good to see that Lisa Corley, meeting organiser, set up CETIS Pedagogy forum
• With the focus on personalisation, what's the role of the teacher?  Should it be mainly to guide and point the student in the right direction?
• There's a need to balance between transmission of the teacher and personal exploration of the student.  With so much emphasis on offering choices (and resultant tick boxes fatigue) there's the issue of how to provide suitable defaults and then the focus can be more fundamentally on individual decision making.

There was a comment that students are often geared to seeking certification, so actually they're not looking for choices but just want to know the minimal path to that goal. It's very strongly manifest in UK Education today, from early childhood onwards.

Social context

• Are PLEs a problem more than a solution?
• Do they start from anti-institutional stance?
• What do we do for learners who are/ come "outside the system"
• Are PLEs coming out of the institution?
• Note the contrast between some real practice (work based examples of learning and skills acquisition) with funding going to experimental development.
• the integration of the educational and non-educational

HEI Institutions - IT services

• IT services barrier on using external systems
• The call for edu establishments to relinquish their role of ISP and concentrate on education, allow this to be handled externally
• How to go from where/how institutions are now to a breakdown of various barriers?
• (VLEs are systems to handle complexity, similar to streaming and other mainstreameducational devices).
• Will the development of portals that link with instittutional vles work?  Would they work if they simply provide easy access to good materials?
• The view that there will be a bigger role for things less institutionally controlled
• Access to learning resources transcending institutional boundaries
• "Learning networks" that access a variety of resources using a variety of means

If there's one general issue that I would pick out from the meeting, I think it is what I call the 'insider/outsider' issue, which seemed to run right through it.  There's been a lot of reaction to institutional VLEs, hosted by central administrative systems, monolithic and constraining the pedagogy.  Opinions can become polarised, and it seems in jumping onto the Web2.0 bandwagon, some have come right out of institutional IT services, but it can make them become – as far as institutions are concerned – relative outsiders, particularly to decision-making processes. 

So it seems to me really necessary that groups of ed tech experts, be not only well-informed among themselves, but better connected to those outside that group, to the institutions as they are now, so that there may be a better chance for their expertise to permeate.  I showed the list of participants to a colleague, he responded, "It's the usual list of suspects."   So the more general event today is important.

[I'm reminded of hearing from a Quaker that he regretted in many ways how historically the Quakers broke away from the established Church.  Although they could subsequently practice in the way they deeply wished, it meant that they had little impact on what happened inside the Church; if they had stayed inside, they might have been able to spread their approach more effectively, affecting many more people in their spiritual practices.]

Student context

• Many students "already in PLE world", sharing of content with the world, etc
• It was noted several times that some students are already creating their own environments, choosing their own tools, especially if the ones offered weren't considered good enough. 
  

Standards

• What is meant by standards? (in light of JISC's mantra of standards and e-frameworks)
• A call to adopt a lightweight, pragmatic approach

Notions of personalisation, personal learning etc

• What can we learn from ePortfolios?  A "personal learning space" They are based on similar principles - simple to use; they have a creation focus (many papers read, consume)
• What makes for a "personal system"?  Anecdote of eportfolio on a server next to the vle server, where the users perceive it as a personal system, because they create for themselves.  They can make it private or public, can link outside

Notions of PLEs

• PLE as an approach rather than application:
• If the core of a PLE is user's ability to create, aggregate, share content, then could a vle become a ple if that functionality were added? (Is functionality alone sufficient to justify the use of the term?)

Given these notions of personalisation and PLEs, I asked whether then the MyWebLearn developments for Bodington might then be called a 'PLE' and the reply was yes :-)  With so many tools at an individual's disposal, not subject to an institution's hierarchy, this could become really significant.

Web2.0

• If we've got Web2.0, then what is e-learning2.0?  What role for the PLE?
• Investigations of web2.0 and the synergy it might bring
• The role of content syndication
• Mention of 'personal research environment' with the use of web2.0 tools, which help in organisation.

What weight of technology development?

• Overall feeling that it should be lightweight
• Now can we use existing sites, at tag, API level and just provide a little glue (use browser windows)  [This echoes a colleague's concept of portal being basically multiple browser windows on your desktop.]

Technical Issues

• How to just explore capabilities than build "the system"?
• What do you do about the issue of [ever reducing] 'highest common facot' when connecting multiple services (e.g. chat, IM, many features lost when crossing services)
• Similarly, limited meta data can be shared universally?
• The issue of shared authorisation - most examples were of open access materials or demos of logging in with usernames and passwords for externally hosted services, only touched on ID management... this seemed a big area not much addressed, certainly not from the institutional perspective.

General/miscellaneous issues

• Course expiry (or more generally persistent access to materials)
• If providing an archive then what needs to go with that in the way of community tools?
• What are the attitudes outside the UK? (Some countries have different perceptions of the success or otherwise of VLEs - Norway
• Thinking about getting resources into applications..Is a separate application for educational use a bad idea?

Introducing [the reasoning behind] PLEX 

In the afternoon patterns were presented, work shown undertaken by CETIS PLE project.  The terms in the introduction were carefully couched because several of the position papers had already been highly critical of seeking to capture PLE behaviour this way.  So PLEX was introduced as a platform for developing prototypes to explore publication to any kind of service (whether it be Soap, rest, xml-rpc or whatever - you could just write a snipped of code to accommodate it) and the other part was to support working with all these different sources and then share.  It was not expected to be a finished product - Eclipse was seen as useful with its plugin architecture etc. to support these aims.

As it was it proved useful to focus on some imporant issues, such as assumptions in the IT literacy on using such tools - Scott's demo was full of examples (viewing XHTML source in order to derive URL of server at which to fling data sourced from a mix of OPML etc using Atom Publishing protocol).   Things really have to be simple and unambiguous, some feeling that we should not leave anything to chance with the assumed technical knowledge.

There seemed to be a fair consensus that we should seek small simple examples and build on these, e.g. slightly extend a tool to generate output that can flow through systems, e.g. take a course of modules and generate output as RSS.  

Generally, there was a desire that there should be more integration of different strands (repository, e-learning, etc)

i.e. We need more 'joined up thinking.'

Many others will be sharing what they took away from that gathering and I expect there'll be pointers to the position papers etc. Sounds like plenty of scope for researchers!