Too good not to share

An outstanding poem; ‘In your absence’ by Judith Harris.

It came to my notice via the Anon magazine people.

Edgar Allan’s

Most of us already have Personalised Learning Environments. It’s just that we haven’t named them yet.

I went to a one-day conference at Durham Uni in 2008 and enjoyed a presentation by Lawrie Phipps of JISC. He had done some research with postgraduate students which asked them to do screen captures at random moments. What he found was that students run a range of applications at any one time. These may include an institution’s VLE, but they may also include Facebook, or Twitter, or a music file. The research suggested to me that technology facilitates the melding of our professional and social lives. We can all be multi-taskers now, even those of us who are men with less substantial corpus callosums.

Maybe, therefore, we’ve all got ‘Edgar Allan’s’, that is POEs: Personal Online Environments.

In terms of institutional responses to PLEs or POEs, institutions have to work with them rather than against them. Institutions can provide materials and activities and a drop off point for assignments via VLEs, but then also encourage students to network (either with staff or amongst themselves) via social software. If individual academics set up a Twitter profile, for example, then they can make new articles, blog posts and video resources available to their network, thereby encouraging engagement with current scholarship across a range of media.

It’s time to get up close and personal, and institutional VLEs can’t take us all the way there.