Thoughts on a PLE

I wrote the following as a comment on Dave Cormier’s blog post, “Does the PLE make sense in the connectivist context?”

The reification of the PLE is for me the problem. We all have personal learning environments in the sense of from time to time framing our world around “learning”. What’s in the frame? That’s our PLE. While I have quibbled with the theorization of connectivism (shoot me I’m an academic) I consider myself an open connectivist and I choose tools and use tools in ways that I hope support open connectivism. To me there will never be *A* PLE in the sense of a shrink-wrapped set of kit, though there may be kits that model or scaffold the development of a PLE. This is mainly because my PLE is not the kit but the people in my learning frame and the tools I use to connect with them and to share learning. Perhaps a PLE is more than people and tools, it the shared practice of people using tools together to learn.