Michelle asked us this week to think about our own personal PLE, create a graphic/image, and then reflect on it as it relates to some critical questions posed by her.
I will begin by explaining the graphic above and the program used to create it. In our assignment, Michelle gave us a number of programs from which to choose, in order to structure our PLE. I chose one called thebrain.com. In the introduction video to ‘thebrain’, they speak about how we have hundreds, even thousands of thoughts, that we are often unable to connect and ‘file’ in a coordinated and linear manner. “Why fight it?’ to paraphrase them. This interactive graphic allows you to create a category and then link it, like any good mind-map to any other category with which it might even remotely be associated.
The screenshot above shows my one ‘Child’ thought (Google docs), an offshoot of my main ‘Parent’ thought (Andrew’s PLE). Google docs obviously has its own ‘Child’ thoughts (Calendar, Drive etc.), but those ‘Children’ (my phrase not theirs) also have connections to other thoughts such as ‘Daughter’s Schooling’ and ‘Master’s Work’. The process of playing this graphic through was honestly quite dizzying. I had planned on adding many more categories but at some point I had to be realistic about my expectations.
What I love most about this is the concept that we can’t alway file something in one place as it may have many folders in which it could fit. Over the years I have gone to look for a Grade 7 Humanities project and found myself looking in “Grade 7”, “Language Arts”, “Socials” and any number of other folders in which I may have stored that particular file. I would love to have a file management system at school that worked in this exact same manner.
One purpose of a PLE, as far as I have understood it, is to have students, and perhaps ourselves, organize what they know in terms of available resources into categories. Then when they encounter a new program or resource they can easily file that new one, if they deem it appropriate for them, into one of those categories for future use. Each time I talk about this I picture my ex grade 7 students going off to high-school with this bank of resources under their belt: Audacity for recording sounds and making radio shows; Movie Maker for film production; Google SketchUp for 3D rendering and so on. I love the fact that, whether they realize it or not, I have helped them to create their own ‘bag-o-tricks’ from which to draw from when given the chance to represent their learning in various fashions.
I feel as if I really only scratched the surface of PLE’s this week, however, it was a scratch big enough to inflict some major thought changes and provocative discussion on the topic. I do hope to come back to it as some point because I would love to have students begin their own Graphic that they could add to as the years go by.