Just over a year ago, we held a symposium in which we analysed where we were on issues related to Personal Learning Environments (PLE), yes, we were not talking about personalisation, nor about adaptive learning, but about PLE, that elusive concept that we have been talking about for over 15 years but which, being little or nothing linked to productive or remunerated issues, has a “discreet” predicament. We talked about that symposium in the entry: LET’S TALK ABOUT PLE IN TEEM 2021 of the TEEM2021 congress and we were able to write a summary article about the session we held at that congress, “Personal Learning Environments as a Framework for Flexible Learning: Exploring Consensus, Asking Questions and Tracing Challenges“ (yes, it is just in Spanish but I’m sure the DEEP_L translation would help you to read it if you want ;-)), where the organisers of the Symposium (Graham Attwell, Nada Dabbagh and myself) collected the conversations of that time and explained where we were as far as PLE was concerned.
As a result of that symposium, we launched a special issue for the RED magazine “Revista de Educación a Distancia” (Vol. 23 Núm. 71 (2023) https://doi.org/10.6018/red) , which we titled like this post and which was published on January 1st, with the new year, and of which I leave you the list of contents below:
Articles
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SPECIAL ISSUE PRESENTATION
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Metacognitive skills and emotions in the construction of Personal Learning Environments
Urith Ramírez-Mera, Gemma Tur -
Exploring the effect of social media in personal learning environments in the university settings: scenarios, good practices, and challenges
Raquel Gil Fernández, Diego Calderón Garrido, Carolina Martín Piñol -
Reconfiguring Personal Learning Environments in Higher Education
Cristhian Elizabeth Fuentes Rodríguez -
Development and Validation of a PLE Scale from the Learner and Learning Perspective in Tertiary Education
XiaoShu Xu, Yunfeng Zhang, Kexin Zhong, Vivian Ngan-Lin Lei, Jia Liu -
Assessing the presence of the ‘Personal Learning Environment’ concept across the web domains of Spanish Higher Education institutions: a web mention study
Jonatan Castaño Muñoz, Daniel Villar-Onrubia
I would highlight that new names and areas of PLE research appear in the issue articles. Also, some of the articles “listen” to what we said at the symposium, that some melons are opened, that there is variety in the discourse, but that we always, always talk about PLE, not personalisation, but about making learning more personal.
I hope you will be interested enough to read some of the articles and find them interesting and thought-provoking enough to comment on them and continue the conversation.
I want to thank my colleagues Graham and Nada, my gang in this effort as Guest Editors, the authorship teams who have participated, the people who sent in their proposals and who – for whatever reason – could not be included in the issue, the people who helped us by reviewing the articles and, of course, the journal’s team who altruistically maintain this channel of disseminating research. Without all of you, this would not be possible. Thank you.
Now, let’s read!