The LXP final report states that “students see the personal computer as their central learning tool”.  This is enough to make a nonsense of the debate between VLE and PLE because both ultimately entail  “using my main way of browsing and typing with a computer”.  Another way to make a nonsense of this debate is to take the idea of environment literally and say that my learning environment is the place where I sit – see the main illustration to this post.

I still think there is a useful level at which the distinction can make sense for a particular type of teaching. … There are necessary features in formal education  which can’t be met in a world where everyone is centering their work on a self created toolbox…

I can imagine interacting with a series of different PLEs as a teacher of English as a foreign language on line. The approach would be “whole language”  with one-off achievement testing. So your teacher says go away and immerse yourself in English – read listen and produce anything you are interested in, keep in touch and feel free to ask questions, then come back next month and and I’ll tell you whether your proficiency has increased. Quite a feasible and attractive way of working with a one-to-one learner, or a small group with similar problems and objectives.

The VLE can have two sorts of function that a teacher won’t be able to do with a PLE, unless they are completely freed from the need to treat everyone in a cohort of students fairly. These functions suppose that the teacher is providing something more than the loose encouraging contact shown in the example above, and that there are  certain external standards that apply to all students accessing the material:

1 collecting a series of assessments as official scores that enable the student to pass a “course”. This supposes some official place which records an “audit trail” showing how the student has done enough to satisfy the requirements. This will only happen in formal education.

2 implementing conditionality. The teacher may want to be 100% certain that materials are viewed in a particular order. This is a use which will only happen where there is a course author / learning designer – a person who is a subject expert in the field being studied

(This is quite likely in language teaching, although still controversial. There is a respectable school of thought which says that students should be exposed to the “whole language” from the start. I tend to think that there are limits to this: for example I’d say English speakers would do well to start reading Russian by spending an hour or so just paying attention to the alphabet with access to some information on pronunciation, rather than plunging straight into War and Peace.)

The size of conditional segments may vary. It could be a lesson plan for 40 minutes work. It could be locked access to a week’s work, or as we have in H800, timed access given to TMAs when they are several months ahead.

It makes sense that people will import the segments into a PLE if they want. But if these kinds of granularity appear in their study material, then students will always need to refer to a “management system” that treats everybody in a standard way…at the points where they want to get through a conditional gate, or record their achievements for assessment.