TASK. 8 "PLE" - Translator

Translator: Lidia Peñalver Martínez

• PLE: the personal learning environment is a techno-social reality and techno-pedagogical approach that embodies the sociomaterial entanglement with which people learn. It is the combination of tools, sources of information, connections and activities each person uses regularly to learn. It is not only about the tools but how I use them and how frequently. The objective of a teacher, regarding the PLE,  is to incorporate their classes in the students’ PLE. The personal learning environment integrates the learner’s relationships with other people that constitute the learner’s social distributed cognition or the personal learning network (PLN). The PLE could be said to have 3 main components:   

1. Access & decode (multimedia information). Example: blogs, wikis, social networks, news, …

2. . Recreating (doing/reflecting about information). Example: computer programs, audiovisual editing, wikis y blogs, ….                                 

3. Discuss (discussion and controversy with others). Any tool that helps you stay in contact with third parties. Ex.: social networks, video conferences, chats…

• Diagram: a diagram is a graphic or drawing (either digital or in paper) that shows and represents schematically the appearance, structure, or workings of something as well as its relations and parts. There are several types of diagrams, for example, the Venn Diagram. That type of diagram (which is the one we used for this task) is a graphical representation that uses overlapping circles to illustrate the logical relationship between two or more groups of elements. It is typically used to graphically order groups, highlighting how similar or different the common elements are. Other types of diagrams are mind maps, dendrograms, triangle charts…

• PLN: a personal learning network is a way of describing the group of people that you connect with to learn their ideas, their questions, their reflections, and their preferences. It could also be defined as the compound of tools, mental processes and activities that allow to share, reflect, discuss and reconstruct knowledge with other people. The tools that allow us to be in contact with third parties and interact or discuss with them take part in the personal learning network.

• Socio-material entanglement: socio-material entanglement refers to the relationship between the social conditions and the materials, knowledge or tools we use for learning. This means that the things we learn depend on the context. It is not the same to live in a rich country where there are a lot of resources and facilities and the variety of tools enables the people to learn in a better and more sophisticated way. Meanwhile, the poor countries don’t have so many digital tools but they do learn in different ways, always taking advantage and making the most of the resources their environment and context have.

• Techno-pedagogical approach: could be defined as a goal or purpose of someone regarding both their technological and pedagogical knowledge. The term techno pedagogy refers to the teaching practices that integrate pedagogical aspects (like learning methods or motivation) as well as technological aspects (using computers, the Internet…). A techno-pedagogical approach looks for the emerging knowledge from meaningful interactions among content, pedagogy and technology knowledge.

Specific question:

Weaknesses of the topic, methodology and the tool of the task.

Well, regarding the weaknesses of this topic, we have to admit that at first we were quite confused because we were not very sure of what we had to do, so we asked the teacher and other classmates in order to be sure. The issue was that we didn’t understand if we had to show the similarities of our PLE or the differences. Therefore, we realized that the goal was to talk all together and reflect about each one of us, and show in the diagram and tell to the class in the presentation about the use of the tools but focusing on our individual differences. Apart from that, we didn’t really encounter a big weakness or difficulty when doing this task, since, once we understood everything we worked pretty well and we managed to get to a final result which we are pretty happy with.

So as to perform this activity we followed several steps. The first one was making sure that we understood the objective of the task, after that we completed the surveys about the use of the different tools. Later, in class, we put in common our results and we came to the conclusion that, even though we used the same tools for the same purpose to work in this university course, we all have different conditions that directly affect the use of each of them. After realizing our similarities and, more important, our differences, we made the diagram reflecting these individual differences.

For doing this task about PLE we used WhatsApp where we shared our ideas and came to agreements, and Google Documents where we wrote the whole task for later uploading it to Blogger (the tool we use for our blog). Moreover, Canva was the tool that allowed us to create the diagram where we reflected our differences regarding the use of the tools. Other tools we used are DeepL and Wordrefernce to check for words and expressions in English we didn't understand. What is more, in order to understand what PLE was and everything related to the task we read Chapter 1 of the book  Entornos personales de aprendizaje: claves para el ecosistema educativo en red, and we watched the videos about the task, because that way we were more aware of the PLE meaning.