I am pretty excited this week as the first PLE Conference finally is about to begin. On Thursday and Friday many people interested in the PLE concept and networked learning are meeting in Barcelona.

My colleague Ilona Buchem asked me to co-chair a workshop at the conference that will focus on the collaborative definition of the term PLE (see her blog post & the update about the workshop). While there are many definitions out there (see for example the mentions at Beat’s Biblionetz) we try to focus on four concepts that are (at least for us) mainly relevant for the understanding of PLEs and try to make them the starting point for a discussion:

1. Content (moderator: Ilona Buchem)
2. Learning (moderator: George Couros)
3. Technology (moderator: me)
4. Social Interaction / Social Change (moderator: Cristina Costa)

In fact four groups will have the chance to work on their own Mindmeister mindmaps and add their point of view regarding the four main concepts that we figured out. We are looking forward to the creativity and power of the participants of the workshop regarding our main concepts and wether people agree with them, if they’ll add or remove main concepts, which subconcepts they’ll add etc. Within the workshop four local groups and all remote participants can work out their own mindmap which we’ll compare at the end of the workshop. We all agree there is not the ONE definition of what a PLE is, but with the workshop we try to figure out diverse dimensions and digg into the different understandings of different people.

Graham Attwell already tried to give a 140 character definition you can start to think about:

PLEs are the spaces in which people interact, communicate and whose result is learning and development of collective know-how

Here are the motivational slides Ilona put online, see also George Couros’ post on the workshop (look at the comments!!!)