למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

Why don’t we talk about PLEs anymore

At a fundamental educational level, the PLE didn't work. We thought that technology would challenge institutional hegemony. It hasn't. We thought that learners would prefer to use their own tools for learning. Mostly, they didn't. Institutions seem more powerful than ever - even the weaker ones are getting stronger.

There is a simple distinction which divides the concept of ‘Learning’ from that of ‘Education’. Whilst ‘education’ manifests itself in institutions, textbooks, classrooms, curricula and teachers – all of which we can point at – learning itself is something that goes on in peoples’ heads: there is, ostensibly, nothing to be pointed at beyond accounts of subjectivity.

The implication behind the PLE, as an intervention in learning technology, was that a learning environment constituted by personal technology - a learning environment where the locus of control rests with the learner rather than with the institution - provides an alternative environment for learning to that provided by institutions.

Part of the problem, we argue, has been a tendency to only look at the technology and not how it is used. Merely introducing technology to the educational process is not enough.... It has become clear, however, that our primary focus should be on studying how the technology is used. (ע' 1018)

He claimed that the emphases on teachers’ subject knowledge and pedagogy were being treated as mutually exclusive domains in research concerned with these domains. (ע' 1021)

Traditional classrooms use a variety of technologies, from textbooks to overhead projectors, from typewriters in English language classrooms to charts of the periodic table on the walls of laboratories. However, until recently, most technologies used in classrooms had been rendered ‘‘transparent" (Bruce & Hogan, 1998), or in other words, they had become commonplace and were not even regarded as technologies. In contrast, the more common usage of technology refers to digital computers and computer software, artifacts and mechanisms that are new and not yet a part of the mainstream. (ע' 1023)

That is, technology is viewed as constituting a separate set of knowledge and skills that has to be learned, and the relationship between these skills and the tried and true basis of teaching (content and pedagogy) is nonexistent or considered to be relatively trivial to acquire and implement. (ע' 1024-25)

The growth of digital bandwidth means that it will fall to our moment – this early 21st century – to decide the long-term future of this print record. We are unlikely to lose the books as bags of words. But we might very well lose them as objects.

That's because libraries are in a tough spot. Few people check out 19th-century books. The volumes are weird looking to a modern reader, and their typesets seem designed to cause eyestrain. So, librarians—being aware of this unpopularity, as well as their own never-very-big budgets – might decide that they should either put these books in deep storage or get rid of them altogether, after scanning their innards.

Again, lest we become confused and forgetful, the function of a great library is to sort and store obscure books. This is above all the task we want libraries to perform: to hold on to books that we don’t want enough to own, books of very limited appeal, unshielded by racks of Cliffs Notes or ubiquitous citations or simple notoriety. A book whose presence you crave at your bedside or whose referential or snob value you think you will need throughout life, you buy. Libraries are repositories for the out of print and the less desired, and we value them inestimably for that. The fact that most library books seldom circulate is part of the mystery and power of libraries. The books are there, waiting from age to age until their moment comes. And in the case of any given book, its moment may never come – but we have no way of predicting that, since we are unable to know now what a future time will find of interest.