Personal Learning Environments

Anyone with a modicum of insight will see that there are several parallels here with the battle between the institutional VLE and Edupunk style 'do-it-yourselves' personal web tools. The shiny, expensive and cumbersome VLE dominates the battlefield that is education, and is supposedly the killer application that all colleges and universities have bought into. The colour of the banner doesn't matter, because whatever the brand, the VLE has essentially a common architecture and purpose: it is there to restrict access, deliver homogenous content and control the activities of its users. It lumbers ever forward into confined spaces, tripping itself over as it goes, and is slow to adapt to new requirements. Whilst its champions think it is invincible, they don't seem to realise that it is becoming bogged down in a morass of apathy, resistance to use and lack of response to change.
The personal web by contrast, moves along lightly at the pace of its users, being directed as changes and personal needs dictate. It has an awesome array of choices, and is responsive to the needs of communities of practice as well as the individual. It is cheap, and not very attractive (at least in corporate terms) when compared to the institutional VLE, but it is a damned sight more effective when it comes to supporting learning. The institutional VLE is led by the entire institution and is therefore slow to respond to change, whilst the personal web is led by one user. The personal web has one more key advantage — it is owned by the individual who created it.