Friday 10 July 2009

The VLE is dead. Long live the PLE!

There has been a good deal of discussion in various blogs that I read about the death of the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). Many educators are now arguing that the Personal Learning Environment (PLE) points to the future of e-learning. The Wikipedia article gives a good idea of what a PLE is all about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_personal_learning_environments

I can see a PLE working for older learners (and that obviously includes me) - and in effect I have already set up my own PLE using a variety of Web 2.0 tools - but will it be suitable for children of school age? Will this be a feature, for example, of the new Open School for Languages (OSfL)? The contract for the development of the OSfL has been awarded to Lightbox Education: see the Press Release.

Graham Davies

2 comments:

Graham Davies said...

I should have mentioned the earlier thread that I started, headed "Death of the VLE?" (August 2008):

http://ictforlanguageteachers.blogspot.com/2008/08/death-of-vle.html

See also Section 8 of Module 1.5 at the ICT4LT site:

http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod1-5.htm

Graham

Graham Davies said...

The term PLE appears to have been replaced by Personal Learning Network (PLN) - or maybe there is a difference that I am unaware of. I quite like the idea of an "environment" rather than a "network".

The Open School for Languages (OSfL) is now up and running and goes under the name of MYLO (MY Languages Online):
http://mylo.dcsf.gov.uk/
I am not sure that MYLO is functioning as a PLE. It appears to be a collection of fairly basic vocabulary exercises, but it is possible for schools to sign on and compete with one another. See my later blog posting at
http://ictforlanguageteachers.blogspot.com/2010/11/mylo-new-way-to-learn-languages.html