Week 2: PLE

PLE what on earth is that? 

Clint Lalonde refers to a PLE (Personal Learning Environment) as an ecosystem to the PLN (Personal Learning Network); that is to say he sees the PLE as the tools needed to create and maintain a PLN. Lalonde also defines a PLN as, "a network of people you connect with for the specific purpose of learning". 

Creating my PLE was very difficult, even after all the readings I felt so lost on what I was supposed to do. How is this supposed to help me learn? Why is this important? How can making a diagram of my PLE help me become a better learner? 

I realized that to answer my questions I needed to first just go ahead and make one and then with that visual I could analyze it. So I did, I made my PLE and then looked at it...for a long time; all I saw was a bunch of websites and apps that I use. I went back over the readings and something Wendy DG said helped me to understand what this was all for. She talked about how we spend too much time focusing on technology itself and the tools rather than the learning potential behind these tools. 

Carey, K. (CC) 2015.

Then finally it hit me. I looked at my PLE and realized what it was telling me; that I suck at using my digital environment for learning (academic) or professional purposes; but that I could easily change this without drastically altering my tools. 

I have four categories in my PLE: Professional, school, entertainment and communication. The two biggest categories are entertainment and communication. These two categories actually seem to work hand in hand. I realized a lot of my entertainment comes from a lot of my communication sources and vice versa. The part that actually got me excited about making a PLE was the ability to personalize it based on my learning style, in school I am always told exactly how to do things so it was nice to be able to do something that I knew reflected me. 

I started to think about how other people use some of the same tools, and I realized a lot of people use it in the profession to promote and connect to others. i can do that too and I don't even have to change my tools!

For me making my PLE was more for the present, how do I use technology now in general. From there I was able to see my strong and weak spots and then use them to create a future goal. My future PLE goal is to have my professional category sharing tools with my communication and entertainment categories.

Below are my goals for my future and how I plan to get there.

Personal

In 5 years I hope to be in either South Korea or Spain teaching English at a high school level. I hope to have acquired my M.A by that time from either a UK university (Oxford University) or an Australian University (University of Melbourne). I hope to have a lot of knowledge and have aided in the creation of some curriculum.

At the moment I am finishing up my final semester at Brock University to get my B.A in Applied Linguistics TESOL. I am currently applying for a teaching job with the Korean government TALK program.

The differences in these two times are my education and experience. I currently have no full time experience in my field, which I hope to change in one year.

Learning

To get to my 5 year goal I need to gain more practical classroom knowledge on TESOL. I will also need to develop intercultural skills because my goal requires a lot of travel. I will need to learn classroom management skills and how to interpret my students’ needs.

Environment

To better meet my learning needs I will need to surround myself with people within my profession or at least people in the customer service profession. These two areas have very similar traits in regards to how to deal with people. I can also surround myself with people who will constantly challenge me to improve myself and my knowledge. This is much more important than some people may realize; when you have the right motivation to do something you don’t even need to be consciously improving yourself.

Habits

To create better habits for my goals this will include introducing myself into more online communities in my profession.

I hope my PLE can reflect these goals in the near future. At the moment my use of technology does not reflect my personal goals. I believe I can change this though; communication is one of my biggest categories I am very good at communicating through technology and have always practiced good netiquette. I can use this skill to introduce myself into more online communities that can help me get to my goals, and to create some discussions about topics related to ESL.

Carey, K. (CC) 2015.

In this session we were also asked to create a Wordle based on my last post, this is a text based picture that shows the number of times a word was used based on the size of the word in the photo. I have seen these a lot but never made one, I thought it was quite interesting actually. When I looked at the photo the biggest word was "digital" and "footprint", not a big surprise considering that was the topic of the post. I also noticed a lot of words to do with reflection or professionalism, this was interesting to see because it makes me realize that I associate my digital footprint mainly with professionalism. 

A Summary

In short I found my PLE provided me with some insight on how I need to start using technology and how I may be able to do this with the technology I already use. My Wordle helped me see where I think my priorities will lie throughout this course. 

Kat.