Wednesday, September 15, 2010

PLE, PLN, PKM --- I get it, it's about the P, it's personal.

I don't really think in terms of personal learning environments and personal learning networks but more in terms of personal knowledge management plan, which I see as more action oriented and focused. To implement my personal knowledge management plan, I use a number of tools and techniques (my Personal Learning Environment) and I draw upon the people within my network (Personal Learning Network).

I'm still trying to figure this out but I don't want to spend too much time on terminology. It's personal in the sense that it is uniquely my creation and my responsibility.  It's what works for me and what works for me is continually changing so I'd rather go with the flow rather than spent too much time defining what it is right now or what it has been in the past.  The problem is with this approach is that it's difficult to have a conversation with other people - especially a conversation with 1000+ people- if we're all using similar terms to mean completely different things.

I'm repeating myself.  I've blogged about this in the past (in February 2009).  I probably said something different at the time. 
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1 comment:

Dave Ferguson said...

Your tweet on this topic resonated with me (so I guess another post, on "eresonance," had some sympathetic vibration as well).

In my own post about PLENK, I said that I don't think of the people or the tools I turn to as a PLE or a PLN, but that's kind of an anti-jargon bias. And in calmer moments, I know that jargon can be the outsider's label for useful-to-insiders terminology.

In the wider PLENK conversation, as you say, it's a challenge (or at least an uphill walk) to discuss when there are so many different understandings packed into the same terms. Not that that's unique--people in the training/learning world do that all the time.

Impossible to change that, of course. It's just a good idea to keep in mind. Not only might labels be more important to someone else than to me; they might be stuck onto different things.