is it just me

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!!!)

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Good news from Graham Attwell: the website for The PLE conference in Barcelona is online. You can find the Call for Contributions here.

The PLE Conference is intended to produce a space for researchers and practitioners to exchange ideas, experience and research around the development and implementation of PLEs including the design of environments, sociological and educational issues and their effectiveness and desirability as (informal) learning spaces.

Whilst the conference includes a traditional research paper strand, we also encourage proposals for sessions in different formats including workshops, posters, debates, cafe sessions, hands on sessions and demonstrations. There will be a Spanish strand, so contributions in Spanish are also welcome!
We will also provide opportunities for unconferencing events, including the provision of spaces for informal meetings and discussions. Although the main conference takes place on 8th and 9th of July, there will be an informal launch event (with wine and tapas!) on the evening of Wednesday 7th.

As well as the face to face sessions, the conference will be supported by a variety of different online spaces. You can join the YouTube group for the PLE conference at
http://www.youtube.com/group/PLE2010CONF

Selected papers will be published by the International Journal of Virtual and Personal Learning Environments..

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Together with my colleague Tobias Nelkner I wrote a white paper on our work in progress on self-descriptive widget and the design of an interaction language for widgets. This Widget Self-Description and Interaction Language (WSDIL) will allow the easy orchestration of widgets (for example in a PLE or PLME) and the data exchange between widgets. We tend to let users create their own “pipeline” of interactive widgets that auto-update their content depending on events and actions in other widgets.

This video presents how the drag and drop and data exchange between widgets can work. In the example we show a tag cloud widget, a widget that incorporates the Google search and a widget that represents a chat. If we attach widgets to each other they change their content/representation based on the content of attached widgets.

The next steps will include the realization of filters and selectors to let users choose what kind of data is exchanged between widgets.

The presented work is part of the EU funded project MATURE.

Here you find the white paper on WSDIL. Just tell us what you think (remember it is work/research in progress). Maybe you can point us to similar approaches or ask questions that let us explain our proposition more deply.

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Steve Wheeler has published a must-read article on Personal Learning Environments (PLE). If you are interested in PLEs and want to know how they eventually will replace VLEs and LMS in educational settings read the article here.

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Good news this evening. Our paper proposal for this year ICL conference was accepted as a full paper.

on behalf of the ICL Program Committee I have the pleasure to inform you, that your proposal for a full paper was accepted.

Now it’s time to wrap things up finalizing the paper. I’m looking forward to the trip to Villach and hope for great discussions on the topic.

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