Personal learning environments

[cross-posted at LeaderTalk]

I found this map of Ray Sims’ personal learning environment via a link from Stephen Downes (thanks, Stephen!). It’s a neat idea. I’m guessing that it would be pretty informative to ask K-12 teachers and administrators to diagram their own personal learning environments and then have some discussion around some key questions:

• What sources do we tap into for our own professional learning?
• What overlaps are there between staff members?
• What gaps are there within our school organization (i.e., what learning channels should we be monitoring but aren’t)?
• What are some strategies for staying on top of the incredible wealth of information that is out there?
• How do we learn about new learning channels?
• How are we modeling ‘lifelong learning’ for our students?
• and so on…

This is cool. I may try to create my own map and see what it looks like. How about you? What does your personal learning environment look like?

Comments

[A. Mercer]

1.

Unfortunately, I don't need a map to know where some gaps are at my site, sigh. I like this idea, and will likely do my own over break.

FYI, there are two online mind mapping products (free) for those out there who don't have Visio or Inspiration:
http://bubbl.us/ (supposed to be able to interact collaboratively--had some trouble with that when we tried it on Ed Tech Weekly)
http://mindomo.com/ (Needs to be loaded on desktop)

Happy Sunday!

[Ray Sims]

2.

Gwynne: thanks for the pick-up. I like your questions. I had similar thought of making this an assignment within a course (in my case in the corporate setting); however, I haven't pursued that yet. I'm tagging your post as a reference for if I do get back to that thought someday.

Prompted by previous comment:
- The map was created using View Your Mind (http://www.insilmaril.de/vym/ ), free and open source; however, Linux only.
- A good resource for mindmapping tools and techniques is:
http://www.innovationtools.com/resources/mindmapping.asp
- The wikipedia page is also good: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mind_Mapping_software

Ray

[Dennis Harter]

3.

Great idea...I will be doing this now for myself after this weekend's conference.

It also got us thinking about how we can map students' learning of 21st century learning skills K-12 so that we can better articulate and integrate this into their schooling.

Love it!