Stephen's thoughts from PLE meeting
Don�t start with the institutions � the issues become very complex and a PLE initiative/project will quickly drown
Stephen Powell: Personal Learning Environments experts meeting
I have to agree with Stephen on this point. This has happened with eportfolios - they are largley being looked at from the institutional perspective, and in most cases the possibility for creativity, lifelong learning, etc. that a portfolio presents is sucked out and replaced by a set of rigid assessment parameters, and the eportfolio becomes nothing more than a form filling exercise.
If the same thing happens with the PLE concept, then it will move from that wonderful free and organic concept of each person cobbling together the things that work for them at any particular time, a browser here, a newsreader there, a little bit of flickr, a little bit of flock, some blogger thrown in for good measure, and will be turned into some bloated application that students have to download, or log into weekly, and enter all the correct information in, in the correct week, and then submit a dump file, or screen shot of it at the end of the course for assessment to show that they have been learning in their personal environment in the way the institution wanted them to 
January 16th, 2007 at 10:49 pm
[...] Following on from my previous posts about PLEs (June 15 2006 and June 20 2006) I see Wolfgang Greller and Stephen Downes are both questioning if the PLE needs to be an application: The question therefore is: If learners are totally capable of blending various environments together, be it flickr, VLEs, messaging tools, mobile phones, television, etc., why would we want some middleware to do just that? [...]