Community and the Impossible PLE

(or: PLEs? Oh Please!)

The notion of the "Personal Learning Environment" (PLE), as a system "that help[s] learners take control of and manage their own learning" (van Harmelen) has been a burning topic on e-learning blogs, in forums like CETIS, and in many other contexts.  Technically, the PLE represents the integration of a number of "Web 2.0" technologies –Blogs, Wikis, RSS feeds, etc.—around the individual and independent learner. Using the term "e-learning 2.0," Stephen Downes describes the PLE as

one node in a web of content, connected to other nodes and content creation services used by other students. It becomes, not an institutional or corporate application, but a personal learning center, where content is reused and remixed according to the student's own needs and interests. It becomes, indeed, not a single application, but a collection of interoperating applications—an environment rather than a system. (Downes, 2006).

The key, though, is that the PLE puts the individual learner (a word generally used in preference to "student" in this discourse) at the centre, connecting him or her to both information and to communities: "[PLEs] provide personal spaces, which belong to and are controlled by the user, [and also provide] a social context by offering means to connect with other personal spaces for effective knowledge sharing and collaborative knowledge creation" (Amine-Chatti, 2007) Using the term "Social Learning 2.0," Anderson and Dron reinforce this emphasis on community, conceptualizing it in terms of "groups," "networks" and "collectives" (2007).

But the PLE is more than just a communal and informational "environment" that might act as an adjunct to the classroom and institution. It is envisioned as having the potential to supplant these forms, their Web-based accoutrements, and even the formalized the roles of teacher and student: "It’s just you, your community, and the web, an environment where you are the centre and where your teachers - if there are any - are your peers. It is, I believe, the future…" (2006).

But this is where a problem enters in. Specifically, it appears in the first few words of this quote: "It’s just you, your community, and the web, an environment where you are the centre…" It is important to consider carefully the implications of talking about "your community;" or to extrapolate from the PLE designation itself, "your personal community." It is important also to stop and think of what it means to combine reference to the communal with the second person singular ("you"), and to mix that together with the idea of "an environment where you are the centre."

What is a community? Is it an environment in which you are "at the center?" If I were in "your" community, would it be "my" community also? Who would then be at the centre? In what contexts does it make sense to talk of "my community" or "your community?" And what are the implications of community generally for education or for "personal learning?"

These aren't just quibbles about semantics or syntax. I argue that these questions get at important issues about community, and that community (rather than "you" or "me"), in turn, is at the centre of education. The result of asking even the most basic questions about community casts doubt on the viability of the "PLE" idea itself.

Discussion of what "communities" are and how they "work," after all, began long before Web 2.0, and even before Wenger's instrumentalized "communities of practice." First, in modern and postmodern discourses, community and the existence of "true community" is a seen as problematic, as a matter of doubt and skepticism. This can be traced back to the early 20th century, with Ferdinand Tönnies' widely-cited distinction between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society).
Gesellschaft generally designates the kind of collectivity that the PLE attempts to leave behind: Its relationships are defined by professional roles, institutional structures, and by the economic self-interest intrinsic to these. Whether it designates a joint-stock company or an entire nation, the Gesellschaft is a collectivity of laws and regulations, sustained by instrumental goals.

Gemeinshaft on the other hand, is associated with those qualities that are privileged in discussions of PLE's. In it, individuals "are regulated by common mores, or beliefs about the appropriate behavior and responsibility of members of the association, to each other and to the association at large." "The very existence of Gemeinschaft," as Tönnies himself explains, "rests in the consciousness of belonging together and the affirmation of the condition of mutual dependence." In the Gemeinschaft, "individuals are oriented to the large association as much if not more than to their own self interest."

But if the individual in the Gemeinschaft is oriented to community more than to hers or her own interests, in what sense can this community of "common mores" be part of a personal environment, centered around "you?"  What's more, we depend on both kinds of communities to survive and thrive physically and mentally. Think of the rules of the road that impose mutual responsibilities on drivers, cyclists and pedestrians safe. Think also of the friends and loved ones who would visit you, without rules and obligations, in hospital should an injury on the road send you there for any period of time.

Children, students and learners are in a constant, life long process of being integrated and re-integrated in different ways into these networks of responsibility and obligation. Some of this can be explicitly taught, other aspects are more implicitly "socialized."

The obligations and responsibilities that constitute both Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft do not merely extend synchronously between persons alive and active in the same society at the same time. They stretch across generations, in the form of traditions, artifacts (e.g. technologies), histories (e.g. conquests), social structures, and debts --both literal, like the US debt, and more figurative, like the "offsets deficit" resulting in global warming. These are issues that have little to do with personal preference or the construction of networks in which "you" are at the centre. Yet coming to grips with their collective weight is essential to being a responsible member of society.

In technically-oriented discussions of education, it is easy to forget that educational institutions (and technologies themselves) are not simply about their overt educational functions. Education cannot be reduced to an aggregate of the outcomes in a curriculum or on course syllabi. People do not simply become effective knowledge workers or even autonomous individuals by going to school. They become parts of both multiple and overlapping Gemeinschaften and Gesellschaften (plural). School is where society reproduces itself, where one generation takes over for another, where collective achievements and problems are passed from one generation to the next.

Both Gesellschaft and Geminschaft play indispensable roles in this reproduction process. However, true to their form as collectivities of "common" (rather than individual) "mores," communities of Gemeinschaft are not simply means to an end in this process; if anything, it is the other way around:

this kind of community…can not be brought into existence in any deliberate or technical way. [This] community is not the result of work, it doesn't come into existence through the application of a technique or technology. In this respect [it] can never become a new educational tool or a new educational program (Biesta, 2007).

Without taking these complexities of community into account, the emphasis on the individual and on "you" in PLE discussions takes on a distinctly narcissistic tone. Because of their central importance to education, communal and reproductive dynamics not only underscore the value of more conventional forms of education, they also spell out the impossibility of the PLE as any kind of general educational solution.

Sources:

Biesta, G. (2006). Beyond Learning. Democratic Education for a Human Future. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.

Hug, T. (2007). Didactics of Microlearning: Concepts, Discourses and Examples. Muenster: Waxman. Many of the arguments presented here are developed further in the introduction to this collection that I co-wrote with Dr. Hug.