Some thoughts on PLEs, in response to the recent ALT-C Conference, in Edinburgh.
I didn't blog during the conference itself, but took notes, pondered, and waited for it all to sink in and for my thoughts to coalesce a bit. There were too many competing strands and ideas flying around for me to try and make sense of it at the time. It's probably worth noting that the following notes and criticisms relate to my take on what I would term the "personalisation agenda", not necessarily to personalisation per se.
PLEs would appear to sit neatly within a "consumer" model for education. Perhaps too neatly. I am not entirely comfortable with the vision of institutions as "providers" and students as "clients" or "consumers." I get nervous when institutions become too corporate- / market-friendly.
How do the personalisation agenda and the consumer model for education challenge our vision of the social and charitable dimensions of education?
The personalisation agenda appears too individualistic to me. It appears to fit well with a vision of the student as an individually-motivated, strategic high achiever. Yet by adopting the language of personalisation to address the specific learning needs of individuals, are we losing focus on a key aspect of learning -- the ways in which individuals learn not in isolation, but in communities? Surely Lave and Wenger's work on Communities of Practice was designed to address just this problem? Are we now taking a step backward, and returning to an individualistic model for education -- a New Cognitivism, perhaps?
