Personal Learning Environments: looking back and looking forward

Abstract

In this paper I look back at the emergence of the idea of Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) and consider why they have failed to be widely adapted. I say there was a failure to understand the role of technology in the growing commodification and managerialism in education. I point to the links between MOOCs, Open Educational Resources and Open Education and PLEs. I point to a contradiction between commodification and managerialism, with increasingly standardized curricula and credentials and the flourishing of opportunities for learning especially for adults. I say progress in researching, developing and implementing PLEs has to be viewed within the context of the wider development of educational technology and of the education and training system as a whole. Indeed, even this may be too narrow a perspective: one ambition for PLEs has been to support learning outside the formal education system and outside the classroom. I look at the growing use of Learning Analytics and Artificial Intelligence in education and consider how this might support PLEs. Finally, I refer to Neil Selwyn’s idea of Ed-Tech Within Limits’ which would foreground the need to plan future education technology use with a primary aim of ‘coping with finiteness’” and “seek to re-establish technology use in education as a shared and communal activity” as a response to the climate crisis. I suggest this could provide a point of reference for us to rethink Personal Learning Environment encompassing the ideas of equity and encompassing both radical pedagogies and the perspectives of previously marginalized interests and non-powerful groups.