e-tivity 9

Personal Learning Environments and Final Papers

First of all, apologies to those of you who wrote comments to the Final Projects post that I did not respond to. I was too concentrated on the wonderful work you were doing on the wiki! I promise this week I'll be checking the blog (and this post) regularly.

In class today we began to take a look at personal learning environments. I know it's not an easy topic and I don't expect you to become experts on it in the next two weeks, however, I do think it's a good starting point for reflecting on this semester and both your present and future learning (since many of you are about to graduate!). Be patient with me as I experiment yet another task with you - teaching you all is very much a part of my personal learning environment as I learn from teaching and the feedback you give me!

Sarah

Purpose: To develop a mindmap of your personal learning environment and to write your final papers.

Task:

1 – Work on a mindmap of your personal learning environment. First do this by brainstorming the different tools and sources that you use to learn. Then try and divide them into categories. You're welcome to focus only on language learning or on your learning in more general terms. Remember, it's your personal learning environment. Just to give you some ideas, here are a few links to some PLEs:
a first draft of mine
Michele's (the one who gave me the idea)
Ray Sim's

2 - Produce a mindmap of your PLE either on paper or using the FreeMind software that you can download for free onto your computer. I'm also having it installed on the computers in the lab and will let you know when that's done. If you do it with FreeMind, you can then upload yours onto their wiki :-) and we can discuss it with Michele on Skype during the last lesson ;-)

3 - Write a first draft of your final paper for peer feedback (I will be sending a file to use for giving peer feedback so before giving peer feedback , look for a message on it!)

4 - Write a final draft of your final paper based on peer feedback.

Respond:

1 - Write a blog post about your PLE.

2 - Provide peer feedback according to the information in the peer feedback message that will be posted at the end of the week.

3 - Respond to your peers' posts on their PLEs.

Timeline: Monday, May 14 (tasks 1-3), Thursday, May 17 (respond points 1 and 2), Tuesday, May 22 (task point 4, respond point 3)

N.B. A personal learning environment is yours, there's no right or wrong, there's just the way you see it.