Unleashing the Power of Web 2.0

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Personal Learning Environments

Unleashing the Power of Web 2.0

6/1/2008

By John K. Waters

Defining the Points on the Continuum

"Yet" is the operative word here, says Gary Brown, director of WSU's Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology, which sponsored the ePortfolio contest. According to Brown, so-called Web 2.0 technologies are just beginning to impact the evolution of online learning, but in the long term, they are certain to blur the definitional lines between ePortfolios and personal learning environments (PLEs).

"I'm not big on definitions, especially in this space, where things are moving and changing so fast," Brown admits. "But we can and should begin to think about the electronic portfolio as part of a continuum. On the far end of that continuum, we see an assessment management system; on the other end, is something that better resembles a PLE. The Web 2.0 technologies that are emerging now-- technologies that incoming students increasingly use to organize their personal lives-- are changing what we think of as an ePortfolio. Mashups, for example, allow students to combine webbased applications and resources into something new that they own themselves and can make available to anyone. That's moving the locus of control away from the institution and putting it into the hands of the student."

Brown's aversion to definitions notwithstanding, right now PLEs can be loosely defined as systems designed to hand off much of the control and management of the learning process to the learners themselves. Through PLEs, students set their own learning goals, track their own progress, select and organize their own learning content, and interact with peer students and others across the campus and the globe.

ANGEL LEARNING ISLE in Second Life is open to educators as a testing ground, to help them understand how to use a virtual world to create an educational experience.

The Evolution of Web 2.0 and the ePortfolio

The link between ePortfolios and PLEs probably was first noted by Scott Wilson, assistant director of the UK's Centre for Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards. In his 2005 presentation to The University of Sydney, Wilson demonstrated how ePortfolios incorporate the architectural models of PLE systems. (The slides of Wilson's presentation are currently available on Flickr, the Web 2.0 photo-sharing website. View them here.) And clearly, PLEs cannot function without Web 2.0 tools: A key component of the PLE is the social networking software needed to support student interaction with schools and with peers. Social networking websites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Friendster fit neatly under the Web 2.0 umbrella. So do wikis (web pages for open collaboration), blogs (personal online diaries), file-sharing sites like Flickr, and collaborative tagging or "folksonomy" tools. The new generation of desktop-type applications that reside on the web, such as Google Docs and Spreadsheets, also are part of the Web 2.0 roster. Of course, MapQuest, Yahoo! Local, and Google Maps (easily the most-mashed resource on the web) are included in that resource list.