Moving Towards revisions on the PLE

Paint and words ... that's how the PLE started. I had tried a number of technological tools (CMAP, Inspiration), but the focus on getting the arrows to go to the right boxes in the right order was clearly not a true reflection of how my learning happens. And it's clearly not how I design curriculum, all in tidy boxes, no matter how many arrows I send off to run between them.

Really, the metaphor of wet paint with superimposed action words is more accurate. The vaguely overlapping puddles of "known or believed things" - where certain ideas have gelled a little more or a little less - make more sense to me than a flowchart of boxes with little fences around them. And it makes more sense to me that there is a foundational layer that is part of my identity and a surface layer at which I am taking in new information, meeting new people, trying new things, agreeing and disagreeing.

My foundational "learning landscape", the wet paint under the words, has been painted by the many learning experiences of my life. It's changeable to some degree, but unlikely to move into vastly different colour schemes at this point. I like that there are no clear boundaries between some of the understandings I've gained and put into this landscape (could I say exactly how I've come to certain conclusions about things?), and I like that in some places, my understanding is incomplete. At the same time, there are definitely places where new knowledge is causing a stirring and a ripple effect that may well influence previous understandings about things, or may fill in some of the gaps I currently feel.

However, having read other people's ideas about PLEs and technology in learning, I feel as though I need to add a third layer to my PLE, a layer of "tools" or, more aptly perhaps, "seeds". At this point, I've mentioned some of the tools or seeds on the "action words" layer of the PLE, but it's not enough.

The reason I need to think about this further is that I want to transfer this idea to curriculum development. I'm thinking of my PLE as a model of not only how I learn, but how content can be arranged, and also how learning can be at once orderly and non-linear. The orderly is important to me because I want to encourage deep thinking (which can then contribute to learners' foundational landscapes) but I want to allow for what Czichsentmihaly calls "flow", which presumes that learners can get into a learning 'zone' because they have control over pace and content.

The "seeds", I suspect, will turn out to be a real range of media. If I were working in a non-technological age, I would see myself leaving folders with provocative, interesting, contradictory, visually-stimulating information around a room and letting students (courageous ones!) figure out how to move towards the completion of a project. Online however, I could use all sorts of websites and links and documents. Now, if only I could find a program that would letter me "scatter" the seeds where I needed them.