Web 2.

0, Personal Learning Environments and the future

of schooling

Graham Attwell
Pontydysgu
1. Personal Learning Environments – cause and effect
Although the Personal Learning Environment (PLE) is a very new term, (the
first recorded use of the term is November 4, 2004) the concept represents
the latest step in an alternative approach to e-learning which can trace its
origins to earlier systems such as Colloquia, the first peer-to-peer learning
system (released as Learning Landscapes in 2000), and to more recent
phenomena such as the Elgg system (released in 2003) (PLE Wiki).
The PLE approach is based on a learner-centred view of learning and differs
fundamentally from the alternative Learning Management Systems or Virtual
Learning Environments approach both of which are based on an institution- or
course-centred view of learning.
In the past I have argued that PLEs are a conceptual approach to learning
rather than a software application. But, of course, developers are embracing
such an approach in the development of new learning systems. Mark van
Harmelen describes Personal Learning Environments as “systems that help
learners take control of and manage their own learning. This includes
providing support for learners to
set their own learning goals
manage their learning; managing both content and process
communicate with others in the process of learning
and thereby achieve learning goals.”
He goes on to say: “a PLE may be composed of one or more subsystems: As
such it may be a desktop application, or composed of one or more web-based
services."
Stephen Downes (2006) says “the heart of the concept of the PLE is that it is
a tool that allows a learner (or anyone) to engage in a distributed
environment consisting of a network of people, services and resources. It is
not just Web 2.0, but it is certainly Web 2.0 in the sense that it is (in the
broadest sense possible) a read-write application.”
Important concepts in PLEs include the integration of both formal and
informal learning episodes into a single experience, the use of social
networks that can cross institutional boundaries and the use of networking
protocols (Peer-to-Peer, web services, syndication) to connect a range of
resources and systems within a personally-managed space.
The ‘pedagogy’ behind the PLE – if it could be still called that – is that it offers
a portal to the world through which learners can explore and create,
according to their own interests and directions, interacting as they choose,

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with their friends and learning community.
“Learning becomes as much social as cognitive, as much concrete as
abstract, and becomes intertwined with judgement and exploration.” (Seely
Brown, 1999).
This paper examines the social impact of Personal Learning Environments. In
so doing, it is difficult to separate cause and effect. Personal Learning
Environments can be expected to have a profound effect on systems for
teaching and learning, on pedagogic approaches to learning and on
knowledge development and sharing. Conversely, the emergence of PLEs and
the widespread interest in PLEs may be seen as a reaction to the changing
ways in which people are using technology for learning, to new societal
demands for education and to changing forms of knowledge usage within
society.

2. The industrial revolution and the challenge to education

Education systems and institutions develop to meet the needs of society at
particular stages of economic and social development. Education systems
serve not only to develop the skills and knowledge in the workforce required
by industry but also to develop social capital. Furthermore, the organisational
forms that education systems develop reflect particular organisational forms
of capitalist production. The present ‘industrial’ model of schooling evolved to
meet the needs and form of a particular phase of capitalist industrial
development. The first industrial revolution imposed new requirements in
terms of skills and knowledge – in particular the need to extend general
education to wider layers of society. In the second half of the 19th Century, in
the UK, there were a series of education Acts designed both to extend
participation in education and to regulate the education system. Whilst
before 1870, education was largely a private affair, with wealthy parents
sending their children to fee-paying schools, and others using whatever local
teaching was made available, the Forster Elementary Education Act 1870
required partially state funded board schools to be set up to provide primary
(elementary) education in areas where existing provision was inadequate.
Board schools were managed by elected school boards. The schools
remained fee-paying. (Wikipedia). Under the Elementary Education Act 1880,
education became compulsory from the ages of 5 to 10. It was not until 1893
that the Elementary Education (School Attendance) Act raised the school
leaving age to 11 and 1902 that the state took over education, through the
organisation of Local Education Authorities and the provision of funding for
schools from taxation.
These reforms were based on a perceived need for Britain to remain
competitive in the world by being at the forefront of manufacture and
improvement.1It is notable that there was opposition to these reforms based
on the one hand on the idea that this would make the labouring classes
‘think’ and could lead to revolt and on the other that handing children to a
central authority could lead to indoctrination.
1

Some of the speeches and documents of the time have an uncanny

resemblance to debates around the European Union’s Lisbon Declaration
2
The organisation of schooling
The form of organisation of schooling and the predominant pedagogy were
based on the forms of production developed through the industrial revolution.
Schools resembled large-scale factories for knowledge, organised into
different departments with a foreman or woman in control of each class and
an overall manager in charge of the school (in older industrial cities in the UK
it is sometimes hard to distinguish between old schools and factories).
Classroom monitors (or prefects) acted as overseers. Students sat at desks
organised in rows. Work was to take place with set starting and finishing
times each day. Bells would announce the start and end of rest periods (or
breaks).
The system evolved to provide a basic technical education for the majority
(through Secondary Modern Schools) and a more advanced academic
education in grammar schools for a minority progressing to university. The
selection of schooling routes was reinforced the class divide.
There were continuing changes and reforms in the education system
throughout the 20th century. In the UK, perhaps the most notable were the
move to end the 11 plus entrance examination for grammar schools and the
establishment of comprehensive schooling and the move towards mass
university education heralded in then Prime Minister James Callaghan’s 1976
‘Ruskin speech’ which argued for society's right to have a say in what was
taught in schools - through establishing a "core curriculum of basic
knowledge".2 However, which sections of society were to have their say was
more contentious. The crisis in industry in the late 1970s led to a merger of
the Education and Employment Ministries, the establishment of the
Manpower Services Commission and an increasing emphasis on skills for
employment. Such reforms basically reflected the changing needs of industry
and the economy at the time.
However, despite the reforms, the main forms of organisation and delivery of
education, the institutional form of schooling, the development of curriculum
and approaches to pedagogy were based on the Taylorist organisation of
production stemming from the industrial revolution.
The new industrial revolution
Industrial revolutions lead to profound and often paradigmatic social change.
However, such paradigm changes in the social arena tend to lag behind at
times of rapid technical development and change.
The present deep and prolonged industrial revolution, based on the
development and implementation of digital technologies, is leading to
massive pressures on education and training systems, both in terms of the
changing demands from society – especially from employers – for new skills
and knowledge (seen in the move towards lifelong learning) but also from the
changing ways in which individuals (especially young people) are using Web
2.0 technology to create and share knowledge (Attwell, forthcoming).
The combination of these pressures is likely to result in a longer-term

2 Interestingly, this speech was still quoted on Tony Blair’s 10 Downing Street
web site in May 2007
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paradigm shift in our education systems – including the organisation and
form of educational institutions and infrastructure (e.g. funding) and curricula
and the pedagogic approaches to learning and knowledge development.
Of course the new technologies have already impacted on education with
various phases of innovation, culminating in the present wide scale adoption
of Learning Management Systems and Virtual Learning Environments. It is
another feature of industrial revolutions that profound innovations in
technology tend to be reflected in older paradigms. Rather than focusing on
the possibilities of the new technologies for fundamental innovation, we tend
to replicate previous forms of organisation and communication through the
new technology. In education we have attempted to adapt the technology to
the existing paradigm of schooling with the resulting virtual classroom and
virtual college.
Where do Personal Learning environments fit in? Personal Learning
Environments represent perhaps the first attempt to develop educational
technologies which transcend the traditional paradigm of industrial schooling
and move beyond the forms of organisation of that paradigm. PLEs represent
an attempt to use technology to move from school (institutional or course)
led learning to learner led learning. As such, the first major visible impact
may be in the institutional organisation of education which forms the subject
of the next section of this paper.
3. Personal Learning Environments and the impact on schools
In the last section I outlined two key challenges to education and training
systems: the need to facilitate and support life long learning and the
changing cultural and pedagogic ways in which young people are using
technology for learning.
How are education systems reacting to the challenge? At the level of primary
education the record seems reasonable. Primary education, in most
countries, fulfils the role of providing basic skills in reading and writing – and,
increasingly, digital literacy - and in providing a social environment for
children to interact. Pedagogic approaches include story telling, group work,
play and project based learning. Whilst universities provide access to higher
education for an increasing age cohort, it could be argued that they have
failed in terms of providing access to in terms of lifelong learning.
However it is at the level of post primary – or secondary education that the
systems seem to be particularly challenged. It is notable that at least in
Europe almost every system is in the process of reforming post 10 or post 11-
year-old education systems and provision. Despite the reforms, in may
countries there remains concerns that the systems are not working3. Even
with relatively high investment in education, the proportion on non achievers
remains persistently high, teachers are often disillusioned, employers
complain about the low levels of skills and competence from school
graduates and many young people, when questioned, are less than
enthusiastic about school. At best, it is just a hurdle which has to be jumped
in order to progress in their lives. In the following section I will look at why

3 See, for example, the ongoing debates in Germany following the relatively
poor performance in the international Pisa study.
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post-primary education systems and institutions may be seen as
dysfunctional within today’s culture and society.
Dysfunctional systems
I want to draw attention to three particular aspects of what I believe to be
dysfunctional aspects of secondary education schooling systems.
Educational Technology
The first is in the development and use of educational technology. Young
people are increasingly using technology for creating and sharing multi
media objects and for social networking. A Pew Research study (Lenhart and
Madden, 2005) found that 56 per cent of young people in America were using
computers for ‘creative activities, writing and posting of the internet, mixing
and constructing multimedia and developing their own content. Twelve to 17-
year-olds look to web tools to share what they think and do online. One in five
who use the net said they used other people's images, audio or text to help
make their own creations. According to Lee Raine (BBC, 2005), "These teens
were born into a digital world where they expect to be able to create,
consume, remix, and share material with each other and lots of strangers.".
However, the major implementations of educational technology have been
not to encourage such networking and creativity but to manage learning and
to isolate networks. Learning Management Systems are WSYWYG – they do
what they say, manage learning. Systems have been developed as a ‘walled
garden’, to perpetuate the isolation of the school from the wider outside
community.
We tend to recreate with new technologies older forms of social organisation.
Thus, we talk about virtual classroom or the virtual university, attempting to
recreate and preserve the old paradigm of education with new technical
forms. Even in SecondLife, a multi player 3D virtual world, universities have
been investing heavily in buying islands to recreate in 3D form their buildings
and classrooms.
In addition, most education systems have acted with, at best, suspicion and
often downright hostility to social networking systems and technologies. In
the USA a bill is proceeding through Congress to ban access to social
networking sites from public institutions. In Europe we insist that young
people turn off their mobile phones to prevent them texting friends in school.
Yet these are the very systems and tools that businesses are increasingly
seeing as central to future knowledge creation and distribution!
Particularly notable are the continuing moral panics over young peoples’ use
of technology. There would appear to be more studies of sexual predators on
sites like MySpace than actual proven instances. Danah Boyd (2007) notes:
“Moral panics are a common reaction to teenagers when they engage in
practices not understood by adult culture. There were moral panics over rock
and roll, television, jazz and even reading novels in the early 1800s.”
Networking, sharing and collaboration
The second aspect of the dysfunction of secondary education is in relation to
the culture of networking, sharing and collaboration. Web 2.0 applications
and social software are increasingly being used for knowledge development
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and sharing and for cultural interchange and networking. Research in
economic development advances the idea of the learning region based on
collaboration between enterprises and between enterprises and other social
institutions. The theory of connectivism states that learners are actively
attempting to create meaning through engagement in networks (Siemens,
2005)
Yet the schooling model remains rigidly tied to the idea of developing and
assessing individual attainment. Of course, the idea that we should enable
each individual to develop to their full potential is laudable as a social goal
but if knowledge and creativity is dependent on engagement within wider
social networks then how can this be developed within education systems
based on individual attainment? (I will talk more about the issue of
assessment later in this paper).
Curriculum
The third illustration of how education and schooling systems are
dysfunctional relates to curriculum. Most learning does not take place in
formal educational programmes. Jay Cross (2006) argues that only 10 -15 per
cent of learning is formal, that 85 per cent of our learning takes place outside
of formal settings. Learning is taking place through engagement in social
networks - both by young people of school age and by older people in work.
Furthermore, learning takes place in multiple contexts, in work, in the
community and in the home as well as in school. Yet our schooling systems
remain wedded to attainment against a narrow curriculum of formal
knowledge. Informal learning is hardly acknowledged, less still fostered and
facilitated.
4. Reschooling society - engaging with learners
We face the danger that school may become irrelevant for the every day
lives (and learning) of many young people. How can we overcome such
dysfunction?
Josie Fraser (2007) has looked at how Web2 tools and applications are
currently being used to supplement the limitations of Learning Management
Systems (or Virtual Learning Environments). In common with many
educational technology researchers, she is interested in the concept of the
Personal Learning Environment. Fraser says the PLE has become a tool for
empowerment as it embodies the principles of self-directed learning. It
recognises that learners exist in an ecosystem and that the PLE is a tool for
learning within that ecosystem. The PLE is the system (or multiple systems)
that enable and support the growth and behaviour of self-directed or self-
motivated learners. Josie Fraser sees such a development as a move from
Adaptive Personalisation to Dynamic Personalisation.

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Figure 2: from Adaptive Personalisation to Dynamic personalisation (Josie
Fraser, 2007)
Learning Management Systems, as they currently stand, she says, “can
deliver two elements of personalisation – they deal well with delivering,
monitoring and recording institutional provision and procedure, although
you’d have to argue out on the ground how well they cope with the
customisation. Web2 applications offer a quick solution to the far more
difficult issue of how institutions might engage with and support student-led
participation.”
Critical to such an understanding is a basic paradigm shift from learners
engaging with institutional provision and procedures to the institution
engaging with the learner. This would imply that institutions have to
recognise the new cultures of learning and networking and engage with those
cultures.
Yet that involves profound change in institutional practice and procedures
and institutional organisation and in curriculum organisation and pedagogic
approach.
A new role and new forms of organisation for education
Critical to engagement (or re-engagement) and support of institutions with
learner-led participation is to end the schooling culture whereby schools have
been isolated from wider forms of community and social discourse,
knowledge development and sharing. The present organisation of schools

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and education institutions cannot achieve this. Instead we have to rethink the
role of educational provision and support for learning within communities and
wider society. The following ideas for how this might be done are advanced
as initial thinking in order to promote debate.
Community Learning Centres
Instead of the present schools we could envisage the idea of Community
Learning Centres. These would be support centres open to all ages - at least
from the age of 11 or 12 upwards - although there is a case for maintaining
separate primary learning provision. Critically such centres would be
networked allowing access support for learning currently only available in
specialist schools or in Higher Education Institutions, within the community.
Project Based Learning
Learners could work on projects combining elements from different subjects.
Individual learning plans would be developed through a Personal Learning
Environment with the support of ‘teachers’. Such projects would be
undertaken in teams with ‘teachers’ facilitating learning. Teams could be
geographically based but might well include participants from other
Community Learning Centres and from other countries participating through
networked communication. Although this might seem far-fetched, many
young people participate in on-line communities involving participants form
different countries in their leisure time.
Projects could also include the wider community including community based
organisations and enterprises.
Such a pedagogic approach is not new but the use of new technologies can
greatly enhance the learning potential.
Open Educational Resources
Learners would be able to access federated (or central) repositories of Open
Educational Resources. New resources, created by ‘teachers’ and learners to
meet the particular need of a learning task would be added to such a
repository.
Mixed age learning
Community Learning Centres would support wider community resources
including provision for adult learners and support for single parents. Members
of the community would be encouraged to assist with the learning provision.
The local community, with regular and open meetings to discuss
management and future development, would control centres.
Buildings would be designed to facilitate interaction between small groups of
learners, providing privacy and quiet for intense activities but also
encouraging transparency and communication. It goes without saying that
they would also provide access to bandwidth and to Information and
Communication Technologies.
These ideas are not new. Thinking and practice already exists, although all
too often innovative practice has not been mainstreamed. ICT adds an extra
dimension and creates additional possibilities and may enable the new
pedagogies to speed up the rate of change.
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Higher Education
Higher Education providers would be given a new role in supporting
networked Community Learning Centres. But with more learning occurring at
local level, and learners participating in the network of centres as a whole,
not an individual institution, they would also be able to focus on research
(with that research shared under Creative Commons and Science Commons
licences).
Motivation
Hopefully, over a period of time the motivation for participation in ‘school’
would become a self drive interest in learning activities. However, it may be
that we have advanced the leaving age for full time education too far and
young people, from say 14 or 15, should be offered the opportunity to
undertake paid work whilst learning.
Assessment
At present, assessment is usually based on individual achievement. This is a
substantial barrier to collaboration, reflection and feedback and to project
based group work. Rick Stiggins (2004), building on the work of Black and
William (1998) distinguishes between the assessment of learning and
assessment for learning. The assessment of learning seeks to discover how
much students have learned at particular point in time. Assessment for
learning asks how assessment can be used to help students learn more,
better and differently. Assessment for learning can promote new pedagogic
approaches including peer group learning and reflective self assessment.
Personal Learning Environments
Personal Learning Environments can play a central role in assessment for
learning in allowing learners to record and reflect on progress and attainment
both as an individual and as part of groups. Learners would be encouraged to
produce regular presentations of their work, which would be shared on line
and also provide a resource both for other learners and for the broader
community.
4. Lifelong Learning
Lifelong learning is hardly a new idea. Arguably, the idea of lifelong learning
was originally rooted in the workers’ movements. In the UK, the Mechanics
Institutes, the Miners Institutes and organisations like the Workers
Educational Association organised classes and courses for workers to improve
their own education as well as providing access to learning resources and
social activities. Whilst this provision might have aimed at developing
technical and labour market related skills and knowledge, it was guided by a
wider belief in the power of education for emancipation.
The more recent focus on life long learning, in say the last thirty years, has
been guided by a far narrower discourse. Driven by a shorter product life-
cycle, the increasing speed of adoption and implementation of new
technologies in the workplace and the increasing instability of employment
with the computer driven industrial revolution, it was reasoned that workers
would need continuous learning throughout their work-life to update their

9
occupational skills and knowledge or to learn new occupational competences.
It was contestable as to who would be responsible for this. Whilst previously
continuing vocational training had been the responsibility of employers, with
the state playing a leading role in the provision of continuing education and
training, it is now increasingly argued that individuals are responsible for
maintaining their own employability, albeit sometimes with the assistance of
grants, vouchers and subsidised courses,
If not continuous, learning is now seen as multi episodic, with individuals
spending occasional periods of formal education and training throughout their
working life.
The idea of a Personal Learning Environment recognises that learning is
discontinuous and seeks to provide tools to support that learning
diachronically. It also reinforces the role of the individual in organising their
own learning. Moreover, it is now recognised that learning will take place in
different contexts and situations and will not be provided by a single learning
provider. Linked to this is an increasing recognition of the importance of
informal learning. Personal Learning Environments can bring together
learning from multiple contexts, including from home, form school and from
work and can support formal learning activities provided by different
educational institutions.
Learning in the workplace
Whilst there have been a number of studies in the different ways in which
young people are using computers for social activities and for learning, only
limited attention has been paid to the way computers are being used for
learning in the workplace.
A seven country study of the use of ICT for learning in Small and Medium
Enterprises found that computers are already being widely used for informal
learning through searching and networking (Attwell (ed), 2007)
The survey showed that there was little use of ICT for formal learning in the
SMEs (in fact there was little formal learning taking place at all). However, in
contrast to the paucity of formal learning provision in the SMEs studied, there
was a great deal of informal learning taking place. From the study most
informal learning appeared be learner driven, rather than planned in
conjunction with others in the enterprise and was typically a response to a
problem. Nevertheless, some learners were motivated by their own interest
rather than by a particular problem.
The main means of ICT based learning was the use of Google key word
searches. Managers were often unaware of this learning, although they were
frequently aware of the problem which inspired it.
There were considerable differences in the use of ICT for informal learning
between different enterprises. It would be tempting to ascribe these
differences to age, sector, size or occupation but it is hard to discern such
causal factors from the case studies undertaken.

None of the employees in the enterprises studied had attempted to claim

recognition or accreditation for the skills and knowledge gained through

10
informal learning. It is not clear if this is because they are not interested in
pursuing further formal qualifications or if it is because they are unaware of
any opportunities of claiming accreditation for informal learning.

The use of the Google search engine as the major tool for learning is
interesting. It raises the question of how people are framing their search
terms, how they are refining search strings, how they are selecting from the
results of search queries and how they are following hyperlinked texts. For a
search result to be useful it needs to produce materials, ideas and concepts
which can connect with the learner’s existing knowledge base on the one
hand and deal with the issue or problem being addressed on the other.

Legitimate peripheral participation and communities of practice

The ideas of legitimate peripheral participation and proximinal development

may be helpful for explaining this process and of understanding how people
are making sense of knowledge.

Lave and Wenger (1991) propose that the initial participation in a culture of
practice can be observation from the periphery or legitimate peripheral
participation. As learning and observation in the culture increases, the
participant moves from the role of observer to a fully functioning member.
The progressive movement towards full participation enables the learner to
piece together the culture of the group and establish their identity.

“Knowing is inherent in the growth and transformation of identities and it is

located in relations among practitioners, their practice, the artefacts of that
practice, and the social organization…of communities of practice.”(Lave and
Wenger, 1991, p 122).

Especially in micro enterprises, SME employees have tended to be isolated

from communities of practice. This may be a greater barrier to learning than
the lack of time to attend training courses. One of the most powerful uses of
ICT for learning in SMEs could be the ability to connect to distributed
communities of practice. Many people have commented on the phenomenon
of ‘lurkers’ on discussion sites, lists servers and bulletin board. Lurking is very
much a process of legitimate peripheral participation. Watching, listening and
trying to make sense of a series of posts and discussions without being
forced to reveal oneself or to actively participate allows the development of
knowledge ‘about knowledge’ within a community and about the practices of
the on-line community.

Similar to the idea of legitimate peripheral participation is Vygotsky’s (1990)

“Zone of Proximinal Development”. This theoretical construct states that
learning occurs best when an expert guides a novice from the novice's
current level of knowledge to the expert's level of knowledge. Bridging the
zone of proximinal development construct with the legitimate peripheral
participation construct may be accomplished if one thinks of a zone in which
the expert or mentor takes the learner from the peripheral status of knowing
to a deeper status. This may be accomplished with or without intention as
Lave and Wegner (1991) state:
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“Legitimate peripheral participation is not itself an educational form, much
less a pedagogical strategy or a teaching technique. It is an analytic
viewpoint on learning, a way of understanding learning. We hope to make it
clear that learning through legitimate peripheral participation takes place no
matter which educational form provides a context for learning, or whether
there is any intentional educational form at all. Indeed, this viewpoint makes
a fundamental distinction between learning and intentional instruction (1991,
p. 40).”

However, the expert scaffolds the environment to the extent in which the
learner is engaged with the discourse and participants within the zone and is
drawn from a peripheral status to a more engaged status. The peripheral
learner interacts with the mentor, expert learners and peers within this zone.
More able learners (peers) or the mentor will work with the less able learner
potentially allowing for socially constructed knowledge.

Within the SME studies there were few instances of mentoring or continuous
contact with an expert. The use of ICT was allowing distributed access to
expertise – albeit mediated through bulletin boards, forums and web pages.
This leaves open the question as to the process of scaffolding which
essentially becomes an internalised process. However, the process of less
able learners working with more able peers is a common process in seeking
new knowledge through the use of ICT.

Searching and Lurking

Essentially workers are using search engines to seek out potential forums and
contexts for learning. Selection depends on the degree to which there is a
match of interest between learner and community and also the level of
discourse in the community. There is little point in following a discourse at
too low a level, of knowledge already gained, neither is their an attraction to
a discourse clearly on a level which cannot be understood. Learners will seek
a community with knowledge at a higher level than their own but which can
connect with their prior learning, learning and practice. Typically they will lurk
in order to understand the workings of the community and to gain some basic
knowledge. After a period of time they might contribute in the form of a
question and later again might themselves contribute to the shared
knowledge pool. In this ways they move from the periphery through lurking to
full bound participants in a community. It should be noted that communities
are frequently overlapping and that the use of hyper-links and more recently
standards like track-back allow the communities to be dynamic with the
emergence of new groups and discourses.
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.
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5. Knowledge sharing and development
This final section of the paper examines the impact of PLEs on knowledge
sharing and development. I argued in a previous section, that the schooling
model developed out of the first industrial revolution had isolated learning –
or education – from wider communities. Furthermore the curriculum has been
based on formal bodies of explicit knowledge or on technical rationality – the
idea that it is possible to learn everything that needs to be known about a
subject.
Learning has been separated from processes of innovation and knowledge
creation. Even in software applications, learning platforms have developed
independently of systems for knowledge management (although often these
are merely information databases).

Yet knowledge development has been identified as a key factor in

innovations designed to increase the supply of creative knowledge value:
"what is important for the production of knowledge value is not so much
facilities or equipment in the material sense, but the knowledge, experience,
and sensitivity to be found among those engaged in its creation" (Sakaiya,
1991, p270). This way, knowledge is assumed as the real driving force of our
era but also strictly linked with day-to-day problem-solving and problem-
setting in working situations and, more generally, with the development and
use of professional competencies and expertise.

Alan Brown (1997) has highlighted the importance of entry into communities
of practice in the development of knowledge and expertise. This is based on
“the ideas that learning is a relational social process; that processes of
becoming skilled take place within a broader process of identity formation;
and that recognition of significant achievement (and attainment of the status
of experienced practitioner) is itself a socially mediated (or contested)
process, dependent on the recognition of others and a sense of self-worth.”
Learners gain knowledge through a process of personal and co-operative
experimentation, questioning and problem solving through which meaning
can be constructed. Learning is the articulation of schema which incorporate
cognition, perception and action (Mjelde, 1994). Schema are made
meaningful by jointly carrying out activities with an ‘expert’ in such a way
that the learner gradually masters successively more difficult parts of the
task through successively more complex stages (ibid.)..
As early as 1994, Enkenburg proposed that the authenticity and transfer of
knowledge and skills depends on the refinement of intelligent instructional
systems and on the design of learning environments in which students are
helped to construct knowledge themselves (Enkenberg, 1994). Teaching and
learning strategies include modelling, coaching, scaffolding and fading,
articulation, reflection and exploration.

Within a social model of knowledge creation, the pre-requisite process for

genuine knowledge transformation to occur is that knowledge has to move
from the individual level into wider communities of interaction that cross
organisational boundaries (Attwell and Brown, 2000).

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Attwell and Brown talked of the spiralling of knowledge creation and
transformation through and across different themes. A dynamic ICT
environment allows material and ideas to be transferred rapidly between
themes. That is, it will not involve a static accumulation of different materials,
documents and information but rather it will possess the dynamism to
continually create new knowledge. “Within this vision the role of the ICT
platform is to provide a rich virtual knowledge environment to support the
processes of collaboration and knowledge creation and transformation in the
learning community developed to enhance practice.”
Personal Learning Environments can bring together individual learning and
collaborative and organisational knowledge development. The following
activity diagram, developed for the Freefolio ePortfolio and social knowledge
management system, shows the relationship between learning and
knowledge construction.
Figure 2: Freefolio ePortfolio and social knowledge management system

Although most attention to Personal Learning Environments has been in the

context of education, it may be at the level of knowledge construction and
innovation that their impact will be most profound. Knowledge management
systems have been developed largely in isolation from learning systems.
PLEs can unite processes of learning and social and organisational knowledge
development.

6. Personal Learning Environments - some initial conclusions

Educational technology is a fast moving field. There is a tendency to look at
every new development or trend and pronounce this to be the answer to the
future of the education and learning Nevertheless Personal Learning
Environments are a significant move forwards for three reasons.
Often the introduction of new technology in education has tended to inhibit
pedagogic innovation and change. Virtual Learning Systems have focused on

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managing learning. The IMS Question & Test Interoperability (QTI)
specification for assessment has inhibited the introduction of peer
assessment and focused assessment on what people know, rather than on
assessment for learning. In contrast Personal Learning Environments they can
stimulate the development of new forms of pedagogy and facilitate the
introduction of social forms of learning e.g. use of social networking.
PLEs, by themselves, do not represent a new practice in teaching and
learning. But PLEs can enhance existing best practices and speed up the rate
of change.
Thirdly PLEs bring into sharper focus issues around the shift from teaching to
learning and may provide some solutions to some of the problems in this
area.
However, by themselves, PLEs cannot transform our education systems and
practice. They are but one tool in changing the social practice of education.

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