Ideas

= = Ideas

PLE/PLN Tools assessment - Rick
In conducting various searches and investigations on the state of PLE/PLN documentation that is readily available on the web, I have not seen a comprehensive resource on PLE/PLN tools, their features & capabilities and some kind of assessment of their value. I have seen some lists but they are invariably stale. I've also seen blogs that tout the latest whizbang gizmo but you have to plow through archives to find other, older gizmos and quickly give up and move on.

So this kind of comprehensive online resource for PLE/PLN technology would seem to be a need waiting to be filled.

I was thinking about the best way to present such a resource, and I thought of a hybrid Wiki/Blog. A Wiki structure for organization, search, & navigation, but a blog-like capability for visitors to contribute their own thoughts on each tool as well as perhaps a rating system. So I discovered Blikis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiblog. More to follow!

PLE What is the Human Factor? Is it about PLNs (networks) or Personal life long learning? Both, neither? - Jane
While my interest spans technology, user and utility my primary interest is in the user. What need does a PLE satisfy (whether we know it yet or not). Who is the user? Is she a person or are they a network? Does a PLE facilitate a learners connection to an educational network? What do PLE/PLNs offer learning/education? Are PLE/PLNs an elitist proposition. Will the benefit only exist for those who are technologically elite? What considerations are necessary to open this technology to all?

An idea I've been kicking around as a general User Interface issue but also in the context of PLE/PLNs is this: With the proliferation of new applications, websites, apps, etc comes a proliferation of User Interfaces to master in order to gain productive usage of the program in question. While there are standards of all kinds for various kinds of programs they are not always followed or are partially followed. There are also competing and conflicting schools of thought: minimalist; everything-including-the-kitchen-sinkist; emulate the iPhone; emulate Microsoft Word; desktop metaphors; consoles; vcr-like controls; etc.
 * Response - Rick**

I have been spending some time learning Flex over the holiday break and, at least in this early stage, what it seems they have done is brought the whole baggage of windows & web User Interface widgets into the Flashplayer sandbox. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, it's just that pretty much the same old UI components we've been dragging and dropping onto windows applications, web applications, mobile applications, etc without much change for the past 10-15 years. Yes, new hybrids have arisen (such as the accordian control - see an example here: @http://www.asp.net/ajax/ajaxcontroltoolkit/samples/Accordion/Accordion.aspx) but to my admittedly jaded eye its more of the same.

In defense of some of the more advanced UI designers, there are some new approaches, such as Apple's brilliant development of multitouch for the iPhone, iPad etc and the amazing developments for the Wii and Kinect. Developments in surface UI implementations like Microsoft's Surface initiative bring us ever closer to the UIs envisioned in Spielberg's Minority Report that dazzled dorks like me when it came out 8 years ago.

OK where is all this leading? It's leading to an observation that perhaps has some bearing on PLE/PLNs, their widespread adaption by all kinds of users who could greatly benefit by them, and avoiding the trap of a technological elite's monopolization of this promising frontier. I'm very interested in personalization of technology and I believe that it starts with the User Interface. Case in point - I have an ongoing interest in 3D modeling and animation. I have started many times to learn programs like 3D Studio Max, Maya, Cinema 4D, Modo, Swift 3D, zBrush and Blender. They all have similar functionality (create a primitive (cube, sphere, etc); extrude a shape from a line; animate shapes; add 'bones' to a figure so you can animate it, etc) but radically different User Interfaces to accomplish this functionality. Blender, the one open source offering in the bunch, is the //worst//. It's by far the worst UI design I've ever seen - made by Dorks for Dorks and nobody else. But perhaps it will improve. Don't get me wrong, these are highly complex programs and there are a million ways to skin a cat, so its natural that you would have such divergent approaches to their UIs. I think part of it is that each wants to capture and retain a market share, so they make the bar high to learning their UI so that users won't be tempted to jump to the competition and have to spend 2 months learning and memorizing a whole new raft of menus, keystroke combinations, etc.

Back to personalization - what if I (with the help of a program) could design my own UI that I will use for every technology that I encounter? I would have to define how I want to, say, draw a circle, or invoke a spell checker or bcc an email, and then every program that I use would present these functions to me via my specification. Then every program, application, app, etc becomes a **service** that I invoke from my personal UI. Now the world of technology begins to look a lot less like the Tower of Babel, and more like my own desktop. This would of course entail a fairly large shift in how applications are distributed and made available, but I think it would reap benefits in all sorts of ways. More on this to come but I want to now bring it into the realm of PLE/PLNs.

From what I've seen, the current domain of PLE/PLNs looks like the Tower of Babel. There are a zillion applications, many of them are insanely great, but they all have their own interfaces, their own quirks, their own anomalies, etc. What I'm thinking of in this context is a PLE/PLN personalization program that corrals the spectrum of buttons, inputs, outputs, passwords, keystrokes, etc that all of these tools present into a simple, clean, highly attractive UI that is also highly customizable. So you can take the defaults and start right away (maybe with 4 different choices for layout and 'skins') and customize as you go.

Because these PLE/PLN tools aren't built as services (yet) there would be a degree of compromise required in order to achieve this homogenization. I'm not entirely sure of the particulars as yet but there are options such as:
 * host the tool in an iFrame
 * build a stripped down version of the tool or use its open source 'engine' as a plug in to the PLE/PLN Unified UI
 * RSS the content of the tool into the PLE/PLN Unified UI
 * etc

I don't have all the answers on how to build something like this as yet, but I believe moving in this direction might help to lower the bar of entry for PLE/PLNs, take away much of the learning curve and make more people immediately more productive and willing to adapt this approach to individualized, ubiquitious life-long learning.

PLE/PLN Roadmap for adoption - Rick
How can educators, students, lifelong learners and others adopt a PLE/PLN practice? Where should one start? Where should one go for instruction, tools, connecting to others, etc? How can educators integrate PLE/PLN technology into the curriculum? How can students expand their tools and their connections using PLE/PLNs? Is there a way for solo lifetime learners to connect with like-minded individuals and/or groups and expand their PLNs? Can the existing tools of social networks be leveraged to this end? What about Ning?