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Hi everyone, The purpose of this wiki is for us to collectively investigate project-based learning, and personal learning environments. For those of you who are not familiar with personal learning environments, they involve using a browser homepage, like iGoogle, as a place to organize your learning experiences. Here is an example of my PLE set up for my EMDT graduate certificate program:

If you look at the iGoogle page in the image you will see that my content is organized in tabs down the left-side of the page, with gadgets, links, and news feeds organized on the page to help me easily navigate though my learning one click at a time. Let's take a look at the ETC tab. That is my current class.



On this tab you can see that my classroom links are organized on the left side of the browser, with news feeds about several topics that are related to the material I am working on in the center and right columns. This brings information to my page, rather than having to go out to each site to do research. PLEs can include classroom blogs, and even wikis like this page to enhance the learning environment. Students can have all of their work at their finger tips, and even introduce new sources in the form of videos, blogs, journal articles, and a variety of other sources into the classroom discussion, and share them with other students. It is as if the students are building the textbooks that the class is learning from by introducing new sources to a class blog or wiki. This does two things. It allows the students to taylor the subject to their own interests within a topic, and it makes the learning material more relevant because the student, and his/her peers are building the textbook for the class using emerging technologies. I believe this method of learning automatically enhances student engagement in the project, because rather than feeling lectured at, he/she is a part of teaching the class from their own research.

Creating learning networks should be encouraged. They allow students working on a similar topic to share resources. They also provide ways for students to reach out to experts in the field who are often happy to share information with students.

This leads me to why I have invited you to this wiki. I would like for each of us to contribute materials to this page as if it were a project-based classroom experience, so we can explore the value of project-based and networked learning environments, and the use of PLEs to simplify and enhance the learning experience. We live in a new world where there is a plethora of information that students can access using emerging technologies. Since Web 2.0 the Internet has become an interactive medium, where everyone can contribute to the collective knowledge. Use this Wiki to explore different tools that can be used for learning, and share them with the rest of us, so that we can help our students/children become 21st century learners. Learning can be so much more valuable if we give our students the power to access all of these sources rather than their textbook, and a few books in the school library. This Wiki will help us discover new new ways to use projects and PLEs to help our students.

If you know anyone who can contribute to this project, please send me their email to arisutton@me.com, and I will be happy to send them an invitation to participate. Ari