PLEs and Schrodinger's cat
Still on the topic of PLEs - an interesting read from Mike Malloch
. Among other things he states “let’s be very careful to learn from the simplicity, clarity, user-centricity, restraint and attention to detail that characterise web2.0.” and “There are some wonderful applications, services and mash-ups out there,
but existing services and applications are not quite enough to support
the features we can envisage learners having access to in a PLE. Only
by determined experimentation can we begin to characterise and address
the gaps.”
My concern though is that all this detailed observation and experimentation to try and evolve a PLE will in fact change the state of web 2.0 for the learner, and that we will never know what sort of a learner centred environment may have evolved if we had been able to resist the urge to open the box and look into it 
January 16th, 2007 at 10:52 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? [...]