Jeff's e-portfolio

It has been a bit of a challenging week in this course, as I found myself having a hard time getting my head around  aggregators. Perhaps this is because I am too wedded to my ‘hunting and foraging’  style of internet usage. I am not really interested in having everything I’m interested in at my fingertips when I go online. I have enough ways to get distracted from the purpose I log on to the computer as it is.

That said, this idea of Personal Learning Environments, erm, aggregates a number of issues surrounding Web 2.0 that I find exciting. Chatti (2010) describes their affordances in a way that this even this technophobe can get excited about. The author points out that this software- like other kinds of aggregators- has the capability to help people deal with information overload. (See my previous post for a video that underlines the need to cope with that.)   In education, at least here in the west, we strive for ways to help learners to take ownership of their learning. Chatti notes that this goal is supported by PLEs, as they require learners to choose the topics and sources of information they would like to have instant access to and updates from. And, because these information sources would encompass web 2.0 platforms like blogs and youtube, the learning approach would necessarily be collaborative. Students would be able to unlock the collective intelligence of people within and without their school particular institution through social tagging and bookmarking.

One of the most exciting affordances mentioned by Chatti is that of the ‘long tail‘ in education, a concept in itself I hadn’t really considered before.  In conventional learning environments, where the teacher is in control of learning material, there are only a finite number of topics that can be covered in a given subject area. On the other hand, in their PLEs, learners would be free to focus on any aspect of a subject they find interesting, even if these might usually be thought of as on the fringes of a particular subject area. It would also afford them the ability to consume knowledge in any format they find most interesting- video, text and so on.

In my own language teaching, I have strived to move towards a content-based  approach. I think language learning is more meaningful when learners are using language to learn about something they are passionate about. Up to now, I have only really been able to take a survey of classes as a whole, and try to accommodate the dominating interests with my choice of materials. As more level-appropriate materials become freely available on the web, I can see where PLEs will take these decisions out of my grateful hands.

Of course, this will not come without its complications. I have already encountered issues where students choose topics on which there is very little accessible (linguistically and otherwise) information available, thus putting them at a disadvantage compared to other students.  As well, I think there are students who are truly passive in their learning approach. For a range of reasons, some are not as driven to take control of their learning as we would like them to be, but they do well enough as passive consumers of knowledge. Is that always ‘wrong’? (As noted on this blog, my learners do not necessarily take naturally to actice learning.) Can PLEs accommodate these learners? I will have to reflect on these issues a bit more, make myself more comfortable with the technology and consider the practical implications/ challenges in my own workplace before I am in a position to confidently help my students take advantage of PLEs.

Chatti, M.A. (2010). PLEM: a web 2.0 driven long tail aggregator and filter for e-learning. Int J Web Info Systems. 6, 15-23(19).