My Personal Learning Environment

For me the challenge of this assignment was not so much finding the different things that make up my Personal Learning Environment or PLE. I have through this class and from prior experience been able to find a large number of resources that help me stay informed of best practices, new lesson ideas, and technology resources.

What I hadn’t done a lot of thinking on though is how all of these tools interact with each other. Where do I have some holes in my PLE? In what areas do I have strengths that I should share with my peers. This is what I liked about this assignment.

My PLE:

Admittedly I did not take some of  the creative license that many of my peers did in my PLE. However I did give some thought into what I use different resources for and how some of my resources fulfill more than one role for me. My basic categories were productivity, sharing and discovery, and communication. All of these different realms feed into my overall PLE but since no one area is more important than another I didn’t do anything to prioritize any one area. Since sharing and exploration feeds into what I communicate to others I made a connection there. Likewise since communication and productivity often intertwine another connecting point was created to represent that.

In looking at where I need to continue to grow I was able to take the following ideas from my peers. It was interesting to view the work of others and it did give me some things to consider.

• From Jill B Miller: I need to consider having a more thought out process for what resources can best help me pursue personal interests along with my professional ones. The way Jill considered volunteering and personal areas of her PLE was not something that I had considered.
• From Danielle Leone: I need to give diigo some more serious consideration as a resource to include in my productivity and communication realms for my PLE. I know of this tool from this course but have not yet gotten a chance to really use it a lot yet.
• From Hannah Clark – I got some more resources to consider: Evernote and RSS Feeds
• From Dalia Allencherry – In the world of tech it can be easy to use more, and more, and more, and need I say it one more time…MORE tools without really considering how they may benefit us and what the opportunity cost of this might be. It can be easy to get lost among all the different networks and technologies out there and having some filters on what to use is important.
• From David Mateo – The point that most struck me from David was the perspective of just how different collaborating and communicating across the web is today. Where is it going? That is an exciting thing to think about.
• From Alice Keeler – The way to organize and think of your PLE was definitely apparent in Alice’s post. Having ideas about conferences, curration, and presentations are things that I had not given a lot of though to in my PLE.