Sounds interesting. Looks like it is still in beta, but moving along quickly. My first reaction is that it is doing some things that would overlap with other applications I would probably integrate it with, such as the blog and social networking features. I wonder if you can turn those features off, if you want to use other applications better suited for them. I would also love to see it do more with Moodle than just single-sign-on. For example, a nice feature would be to enable the movement of your portfolio items that were created in Moodle into your eportfolio in mahara. From what it looks like here, you need to re-upload everything. Probably not necessary in the first release, but would be nice. Thanks for pointing this out though, I will download and take it for a test drive some time soon.

Hi Keith,
When I think of a PLE I envision a space at which the learner is at the center and can select or add resources without moving from that point. There are several platforms and stand-alone tools out there that are moving in that direction, but I think a true PLE is maybe 2 -3 years out.

To explain what I mean, picture yourself standing in the middle of a two dimensional room surrounded by a series of carousels. One carousel might have materials from all of a students courses on it. Another might have all of the documents (or other artifacts) an individual might work with – these can be either learning related, social or personal in nature. A third carousel might give the individual access to rss feeds, etc. A fourth would give access to communication tools. A fifth would….. you get the idea.

Now move out to three dimensions and picture rooms owned by other individuals with similar interests touching your room. Through the space in the walls they have access to the materials on any given carousel for which you have designated access. Granted geometry prevents us from envisioning this environment at too many levels, but the concept holds.

Add one final aspect – the ability to propagate carousels in other “grids” where users may have only one or two similar interests and you have the basis for interconnected PLE’s.

At this point many readers may be asking how this differs from what we see in any other environment. In every current environment I can think of the delivery point defines the experience or needs to be the focal point. To move to a true PLE we need to think in terms of the user being stationary and the resources as moveable objects. Buzzword, Zoho writer and Google Docs are headed in this direction, with Buzzword having, in my opinion, the best shareable architecture. However, these examples are limited in that they still require the user to enter the host framework – at least for now.

What I envision as a true PLE is a space where these resources become native objects once they are selected. Then when the user is finished with them they go back to the host environment. A crude example of how this might work, is in the case where you want a stream off of YouTube to play in a page you have built. You designate the source of the stream and then designate where you want it to play within your page or you provide a link to a similar resource from a point on the page. Now, the difference here is that the source is designated in advance. What if, from the users environment they could look at the YouTube carousel and select the video they wanted and have it display in their own environment? This changes the environment from a directed one to a selective one. That paradigmatic change is the one I think we need to consider before we can begin constructing true PLE’s.