I have been talking about Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) for almost twenty years, and I have always had a slightly uncomfortable feeling: I think that, in the world of techies, we have never been particularly good at selling —or perhaps packaging— the idea. And that really bothers me, because I think it is an incredibly useful idea for helping us stop thinking in the same old ways… and also for building those bridges that might make what we do more complementary.
While preparing The Lens, the second seminar in Educational Optics, I found myself returning to a conversation from 2010, when Ricardo Torres-Kompen, Graham Attwell, lots of other wonderful people and I were preparing the first PLE Conference. We were talking about “the future of PLEs”, and I remember telling them that I didn’t think PLEs had “a” future; rather, they were “the ground” on which we would build that future… In other words, I didn’t think they were “the thing”, but something that helped us think. I have returned to that idea many times, but while preparing this seminar I think I came to understand it differently. Perhaps PLEs have also been a lens through which to watch the future as it arrived. Not because they predicted AI or any of the technologies that came afterwards, but because they helped us think about learning in a way that remains useful as technologies change.
And that is what I wanted to talk about in The Lens: not to explain once again what a PLE is, but to try that lens again.
In the process, Simon Buckingham Shum did something apparently small that I loved. In one of our conversations during my first few weeks here, he heard me talking about the three activities we have traditionally used to explain PLEs —reading, doing and discussing— and suggested repackaging them as the 3Ds: Digesting, Doing & Dialogue. It is not a new model; it is a different way of making knowledge that was already there easier to understand. And after almost twenty years of thinking that perhaps we had never packaged PLEs particularly well, I’ll take all the help I can get.
Then AI arrived. And the question became what that old lens allows us to see now: what does Digesting mean when a first interpretation may already have been produced for us; what does Doing mean when producing something is no longer sufficient evidence of learning; and what happens to Dialogue and to otherness when AI can be an excellent intellectual interlocutor.
As with The Prism, much of the seminar took shape while I was thinking it through: conversations, many hours making and remaking slides, ChatGPT and Claude as interlocutors, and quite a few instances of “no, that’s not exactly what I mean”. And yes, once again I got rather lost in my own metaphors. I still love it.
And at the end I wanted to do something that increasingly interests me: question my own metaphor. If I had spent the whole seminar proposing PLEs as a lens, I didn’t want to finish by pretending that this lens gives us a clean and transparent view of learning. That is how progressive lenses appeared. When you first start wearing them, seeing is not necessarily easier. Some areas are blurred, you misjudge distances, and you have to learn to look differently. The lens allows you to see both near and far, yes, but that expansion of what is visible comes at a cost: the simplicity of the lens you had before.
I think something similar has happened to me with PLEs. After almost twenty years, they have not given me a simple answer to how people organise their learning. They have made it increasingly difficult for me to accept simple answers. And perhaps that is precisely why I still find the idea so useful. In 2010, I said that PLEs were not the future, but the ground on which we would build that future. Today I would add that they have also been a lens through which to watch it as it arrived. A lens that does not necessarily make things clearer, but does allow us to see more.
And I like ending this way, questioning the very metaphor I started with. Because if a lens helps us look critically at education, perhaps the least we can ask of it is that it can withstand being looked at critically too.
I’m leaving the full recording of the seminar here, in case you fancy having a look and commenting 🙂 or just having a look 🙂