Is Your Learning Environment Personal?

Stephen Downes' presentation of Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) cements the meaning of the name and explains that there is an infinite amount of information availiable online to all who want it.  The trick of course is effectively managing this weath of information and turning it into your own personal knowledge.  To turn this information into knowledge that makes sense to you is the basis of the Constructitive Theory of Learning.  The PLE is a community of learning, of your own interests, where the outcome is not just factual knowledge [like in a traditional classroom], but is total immersion into what you are trying to learn.
According to Downes, there are six major components of one's Peraonal Learning Environment:

1. Profiler System:  This stores your personal information on all websites that you subscribe to.  It is essentially your online profile. 
2. Aggregator System:  This system manages all of your interests.  It manages the reasons that you visit particular sites.  For instance, if you want to keep abreast of all information concearning education then you can set up an RSS feed or Atom feed (there are various aggregator systems avalaible.  This system retrieves education information from all subscribed sites and feeds it to you.  These web feeds allow software programs to check for updates published on a website. To provide a web feed, a site owner may use specialized software (such as a content management system) that publishes a list (or "feed") of recent articles or content in a standardized, readable format. The feed can then be downloaded by websites that syndicate content from the feed, or by feed reader programs that allow Internet users to subscribe to feeds and view their content.
3. Editor System:  This is you opportunity to see all information in one place on your machine and create your own knowledge.  Here, you edit the information supplied by the Aggragator to create a piece of text that you understand.
4. Scaffolding Systems:  These systems essentiallly connect one PLE to anothe PLE.  Here, you can take your newly created knowledge and input is into another learning environment to create something.  For instance, there are various websites that help to make you own personal website.  The site asks you for bits of information for the purpose of creating something unique to you.  The content (facts, video, data, results of your aggregation) are being merged with the manipulation of the data.
5. Third Party Services:  A prime example is an online class where people are collaborating via services such as Elluminate or Webex.  This is where the connection between your PLE and your teacher's and Peer's PLEs takes place.  This essentially takes creation of knowledge to a new level and cements understanding.
6. Recommender System:  This system watches & inputs alll data and recommends other sources of information based on the work that you have been doing.

So, it seems apparent that the construction and utilization of Personal Learning Environments is the wave of the future for students.  To me, it seems like creating a Personal Portfolio electronically.  Then, for assessment purposes, the learner creates a finished product - a compilation of information in the PLE. 

This finished product will demand students' higher thinking skills. 

Teachers will be able to assess students' higher thinking skills. 

Todays' students, for the most part, are not assessed based on higher thinking skills. 

Embracing the use of Personal Learning Environments and other Web 2.0 tools will be critical in the education of the 21st Century Learner.