PLE is an acronym that stands for Personal Language Environment. It is the totality of the formal and informal tools we use to store information, rfelect on it and use it. Well, what's a PLE, then? It's not easy to define it, since it's not something you can touch, you can see...Our PLE is our personal learning world; it's something we create around ourselves and that change, increasing day by day. It’s a sort of space in which we find everything we need to develop our skills, according to our personal cognitive style. There're no right or bad choices, useful or unuseful tools; a PLE works just for the person who need it.
Honestly, I'm not sure that writing down my PLE (and even thinking to my PLE to awake to its strucuture) can help me very much, since I do anything special to study languages and my PLE is probably the same PLE of a lot of people. I rarely reflect on what I'm doing and ask myself the reason why I'm doing a specific thing to improve my knowledge...I simply do it!
However, this activity may have some intersting consequences...I believe we all can learn something by listening to other experiences; it's a way to enrich our PLE and to discuss about learning strategies...
Writing my PLE on paper and making in this way my learning world visible, hasn't been simple. There're things that are obvious for me and I do them without realizing I'm following the instructions of my PLE.
I like the idea of imaging my PLE like a map; a sort of map I use to find something, to achieve something...There are four main groups; GATHERING INFORMATION, CHECKING INFORMATION, PEOPLE and SPACES. I subdivided the "gathering information area" into two smaller groups: FORMAL LEARNING and INFORMAL LEARNING.
I found some difficulties in classing some entries, since some tools tend to be part of more than one group.
Just some months ago, my PLE was different; now new tools like del.icio.us and Bloglines enrich it, giving me other possibilities to improve my knowledge of English (and of anything I'm interested in).
A PLE is a changeable concept that's always grewing into something different; it reflects our approach to learning and given we all never stop to learn and discover something new, our PLE is destined to follow us...
