Design trajectories: four experiments in PLE implementation

Increasingly, there is a shared understanding that the educational approach driving the development of Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) is one of learner empowerment and facilitation of the efforts of self-directed learners. This approach fits well with concepts of social constructivism, constructionism, and the development and execution of learning plans. This paper describes how these have been increasingly supported in four successive PLE prototypes. These prototypes have successively moved towards support for communities of learners by basing PLE design on social networking services, and support for the formulation of learning plans and transformation of those plans into public exhibits of growing knowledge.