Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments

Learning environments have probably been designed to facilitate human change ever since the ‘homo habilis’ started using more sophisticated stone tools at the begin-ning of the Pleistocene some two million years ago. Most probably even earlier than

that. Since then, however, increasingly larger parts of these learning environments have been trans-mogrified to be digital and the design of these environments has been subjected to growingly more conscious decisions. Today not only institutions for formal education but also most work places are equipped with at least some kind of tools that bring together people and content artefacts in learning activities to support them in constructing and processing information and knowledge.

In the recent years, a change in perspective can be certified to technology-enhanced learning research and development: More and more learning applications on the web are putting the learner centre stage, not the organisation. They empower learners with capabilities to customize and even construct their own personal learning environments (PLEs).

Technologically speaking, this shift manifests in a learning web where information is distributed across sites and activities can easily encompass the use of a greater number of pages, services, and people advertised through web-based learning applications. Mash-ups, the 'frankensteining' of software arte-facts and data, have emerged to be the software development approach for these long-tail and per -petual-beta niche markets.

Research Questions

1. DRIVERS AND BARRIERS: What are the drivers and barriers of Personal Learning Environments? Mash-Up PLEs? Necessary competences on the side of a facilitator and learner?

2. IDENTITY: Given a PLE, how can we manage our identity? Identities? What are the characteris -tics of identities? What are the implications of digital identities for PLEs? What about privacy?

3. INSTITUTIONS: Are PLE a threat to threat to institutions? What should institutions do?

4. TECHNOLOGY: The tools that support a PLE or MUPPLE: what ingredients are necessary? What architectural building blocks? What standards and applications do you consider relevant?

5. DIGITAL LEARNING LITERACY: What competencies do learners require to use a PLE? What about motivation?

6. INFORMAL LEARNING: How can we use PLEs to support informal learning? Is accreditation of learning important. How could this be managed?

7. CURRICULUM: What are the implications for self driven learning and PLEs for tradtional cur-riculum design and development?