"- Can you picture and describe your Personal Learning Environment?
- Learning? Isn't that the stuff I had to do at school?
- Yes.. but surely you did not stop learning the day you graduated, did you?
- True… I suppose my experiences, my goals, my thoughts, my responsibilities, my training, my projects, all constitute ongoing learning..
- And it looks you are onto a good thing, so keep with it as "your ability to learn is the only lasting competitive advantage!"

I have been thinking about the place of the ePortfolio in a Personal Learning Environment. ePortfolio and Personal Learning Environment can both be a software system or a concept. I am considering the latter here.

The ePortfolio is a great personal space to collect, select, and make sense of information, throw ideas around and verify the more potent ones.
The Personal Learning Environment (PLE) is a layered, variable, distributed, open, collaborative space.
ePortfolio and Personal Learning Environment are inherently linked, each feeding the development and make up of the other.
PLE is nothing new, but since it is bound with technology its form, shape and purpose continue to evolve with it.
 
To me a Personal Learning Environment is a self crafted connected ecosystem comprising of people, tools, and spaces:
 
 - that I build, maintain
 - that grows and adapts to my needs
 - that is both physical and digital
 - that serves my purpose,
 - from which I collect information,
 - with which I experience new learnings, am comfortable with or challenged into doing new things,
 - that lets me engage in conversation around topics of interests
 - with which I interact and share my understanding of these common interests
 - that allows me to chose the media, the time and the place at which any of this happens
 - where I feel "at home"
 - that lets me dream, frame ideas and act on them

My PLE is a mash up of : friends, peers, mentors, with whom I have a relation of trust, clients, influencers that I respect and who with I connect via a range of tools (some are close some don't know my existence!), Twitter, my go to social media for short and sharp info and for just in time conversations on specific topics, ePortfolio as planning and goal setting space where I produce, archive and reflect on flow, blogs, including mine , Feedly where I make up my own reading lists from blogs of interest, online forums and groups,  and google scholar on serious topics, google alerts, Youtube for "how to" do something, curating tools like Scoop It and Pinterest when researching for a project, LinkedIn as my office, Facebook as my playground, Quora as my knowledge base where I sit tight and absorb,  Evernote to keep notes, email where many a one on one conversations are continued and developed, Pocket to save and organise links of interest… Elements in my PLE are public, others are shared with a selected audience, some face to face, others online, some are private to me.

Some spaces come and go, some topics come and go, according to my needs and wants, new people are added as connections widen and grow, interests evolve, opportunities arise. My PLE is a living space.
 
It is undeniable: the way I learn and work is increasingly project based, individualised, flexible and is also increasingly less structured, less time and space dependent. And adapting to new ways of working and learning require more self discipline, self determination and independent thinking to answer questions such as "how am I doing?" "what problem am I trying to solve?" "how can I do this better faster more efficiently?". Hence my need to articulate my understanding of my own online presence and pin my position in this environment I create.

As I develop the skills and the mindset to evolve in this environment I develop a more open approach to sharing ideas and meeting new people. I engage more in conversations, seeking new information, making new knowledge, and together with my network push my own boundaries. The Internet has multiplied the opportunities to become agent of my learning, transferring knowledge between context and domains as well as people, so I ask myself:

Taking charge of one's own learning is the default attribute so do I want to be limited by institutionalised software?  
Sharing what I know and make it explicit is not an option, do I want to have control of how and when and with whom I do this?

With a device at my fingertips any time any where, it is easy to access an ongoing flow of information, to communicate, to create, share, cross pollinate thoughts and ideas, to participate in a network I build over time,
I can also capture and archive meaningful pieces, organize them for a purpose, and reflect upon them. I blend formal learning with informal, learning is no longer the work of the individual, it is the work of the network! I am not "done learning" I am self directing it!

Along the way the boundaries between my personal self and professional self blur and blend.  And with it the need to "develop a strategy to manage the various information streams" and design and organize my own learning, and recognize it happens in different places, with different people, in different contexts.

The challenge for any learning institution, should they be schools, universities, training providers, companies L&D, is to recognize that individuals' access to information, tools, devices, experts and peers impacts on their ability and willingness to drive how, what and when they learn. The learning institution have to adapt their learning design, the tools they provide, to support the development of learner attributes. Through fostering a sense of community, nurturing a stimulating environment and culture conducive to serendipitous knowledge transfer, ideas and solutions generation the learnplace/workplace will start realising the potential of knowledge sharing and the innovation and opportunities it brings about.

The challenge for the individual is to have awareness of their own network, maintain it, grow it and diversify it. And to realise its potential for personal and "collaborational" growth. My PLE is constantly changing making managing time, sources and relationships within it unprecedented and complex. My PLE is constantly challenging, hence my deep engagement with it.

Readings:

Pontydysgu: New Thoughts on Personalised Learning Environments
Graham Attwell: Personal Learning Environments
Ilona Buchem: Definitions of a PLE
Harold Jarche: The ability to learn is the last competitive advantage
Jane Hart: The Social Learning Handbook

Photo courtesy of: tata_aka_T [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Google+, the second-largest social networking site in the world after Facebook?  
Where have I been?
The statistics and a recent surge in contacts "adding me to their Circles"  led me to take a closer look. As iGoogle closed in November Gmail users were just about automatically led to create Google+ profiles, and to do what you do on Social Media: connecting with others, hence the surge!  That may have confused some that had not realized they had a Google+ account, infuriated others who felt trapped into it, or won over a fair few, but certainly contributed to strengthen Google+ current positioning on the Social Media ranking.

Google+ positions itself as more than a Social network, it also is an identity service and authorship tool, that associate web content, blogposts, videos directly with its owner. This interesting layer is linked with Google powerful search capabilities and it is of particular interests to bloggers, marketers who want to leverage the ability to be found and followed, as posts are indexed and show up in search results.

My focus here though is on use of Google+ by the individual as social media, and as another tool to support social learning.
I am no stranger to the suite of Google products, but had happily left Google+ behind since its launch in September 2011.  Little seemed to be happening there from where I looked, and Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, I believe, mostly meet my communication and information needs!
Google is quite omnipresent on my online activity as it is,  its mostly reliable, quality, free tools and services having contributed to increase my levels of collaboration and productivity.
So until recently I had not payed much attention to +Pascale, my Google+ profile page. Here is what I have noticed, having engaged on and off with it for the last couple of months.

Profile Page: With plenty of real estate, the page format leads you to populate as comprehensive and compelling a profile as you want, included images, a personal story, some work information and any relevant links. The ability to view the profile page as yourself, public or as anyone else is placed quite prominently. Since Google insists on users' displaying a name, it is a welcome feature.  

Google+ lets you engage in conversation, promote others' ideas and posts, comment meaningfully and constructively, make connections, share knowledge: these are key social networking competencies!

Content Sharing: Google+ +1 works like the Facebook Like or the Twitter RT. It is possible to +1 posts published publicly, in the communities or circles you belong to, from Home (Dashboard) and recommendation is facilitated from anywhere on the web where the +1 icon is displayed.  You can share long posts, short posts, links, there are no limits on what you can share and that is conducive to content creation... and possibly over sharing too!
Sharing content with contacts organized in circles is easy and you can choose who to share what with from your post. Creating Circles, either using the default ones when getting started or developing others around a theme or topic of interest, is rather ergonomic, if compared to a Twitter or Facebook list. You can add the same users to several circles if wanted. You can share specific content with any circles privately (e.g.: photos with Family circle only). It helps target who you are sharing what with and possibly increase engagement.
Other users may add you to their circles but you don't necessarily add them back. It is a bit unnerving to get added by a perfect stranger… yet a useful reminder that in terms of privacy, it is always up to you to decide what to share with whom and Google+ seem to address this quite transparently.

Curation: You can search and publicly access popular content from within Google+ on any themes or topics of interest. Google+ is a one stop shop for searching, value adding, sharing… Creating a circle with people and pages you follow on a particular theme has the potential to reduce the noise and get you to the information you want. Comments can be edited post posting, and adding personal insights upon sharing information is encouraged as it is placed prominently at the top of the post. I particularly like this feature as it emphasizes the role of personalization and unique value adding in social sharing.

Communication: Hangout is the most popular Google+  service, a video conferencing tool, allowing livestreaming to an audience you determine and create recordings to keep. It operates with YouTube. Hangout includes a range of productivity tools such as screen sharing, that is convenient if giving a presentation or working on a shared document. You may want to choose to watch public hangouts as they happen also. The potential is huge to increase synchronous communication yet I have found Hangout at times a little unreliable in terms of connection and clarity, and its features keep evolving and made it a little difficult for me the intermittent user to make it as seamless to use as I would like it to be.

Why would I want to persevere with Google+ ? Once I configured my G+ account settings, trialled and errored and decided on how to receive notifications and allow others to access my activity, I started to feel more at home with G+ rather than being swamped.  Accessing most G+ features from my phone is also convenient now that I have tamed the notifications. Photo sharing is one strong point of Google+  and this is an aspect I will investigate further: there are no reasons for me to share all the images that I take from my smartphone and I want to control this closely.
The potential to follow/find topics of interests and meet new people who have insight on these is worth investigating. How will it complement my Facebook account, where I interact mostly with family and personal friends and in the occasional group, and my Twitter account, where I need to give a little TLC to organize lists, as my interests have evolved and diversified over time?  Twitter remains my go to place for information sharing and influences for now. By and large, Twitter is home to my Personal Learning Network. Google+ is getting traction from within my network though: cross platform posting, (and its resulting annoying echo) is increasing. So it is going to be a matter of choice.

To feel at home in Google+ I need first to find the switches!  Google+ is a complex space with many functions. Now I have an overview of what they are and it helps me pick and choose at the point of need. I don't envisage putting all my eggs in the same Google basket.  My "and and and" approach involves managing time, and return on engagement with yet another platform need to be evaluated after a period of time.
I have to make choices and be purposeful in my use of the different platforms, so that each can be useful to me, and complement each other.
I first will add to my ePortfolio circles beyond the contacts I already have, search for others and pages and compare with other platforms offer on that particular theme.  At the same time I will experiment with extending my reach in the area of ePortfolio itself to verify if the following applies to my own online activity: "Facebook helps you to keep in touch with the people you already know, Google+ helps you to get in touch with the people you want to know."