My PLE Diagram Reflection

When tasked with making a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) Diagram and reading that I had to represent at least ten different online communities in the image I felt a bit stressed. Prior to this course I don’t know that I would have been able to say I was truly a part of this many communities. Now looking at my PLE Diagram I can see that I have eighteen different communities represented or fourteen if you combine the different Google resources, and Facebook and Facebook messenger. I chose to combine the Collecting-Reflecting-Connecting-Publishing Model and the Four C’s Model as I felt they more perfectly showed my involvement and thought of my PLE when combined together.

This assignment made me think back to when we were assigned the second week of this class to find an image to represent out idea of PLEs. My image was that of a Spirograph which has many connected, intertwined lines representing the various tools and resources in a PLE. The Spirograph image contained many circular lines as does my new image, but the new image explicitly shows online communities I am involved in as the beginning image did not. My new PLE image also shows arrows around the circle giving it direction. As represented I believe my PLE image shows how I see my PLE to be cyclical and a process and I see it beginning with collect and flowing around. The Spirograph in the beginning was quite an elementary image and my understanding has definitely deepened. My involvement has also deepened quite a bit in the communities in and the tools and resources that I use.

Above you can see six of my peers PLE images. I love how they are all so creative and different. One similarity I see is that if you look you can see that many of us have some of the same communities represented. This would be to be expected as we are all taking part in the same social networking class and have built many of the same connections together. A few communities that I see in many, if not all, of the images are Facebook, Google Apps, and Twitter. One difference I see between the images is whether the communities represented seem to be clustered together or spread out. As one can see in my image, the communities are sorted within each word. I have communities that specifically go with collect, communicate, create, and share. If you look at Kim’s her communities seem to be grouped at the bases, but it is unknown whether home plate is “supposed” to be sharing or collecting, but I think this may be the idea. Josh’s image does not have the communities grouped, but instead has the characteristics at the corners of the image and has arrows drawn between the communities to show the connections. I almost think I like this representation is a bit better this way since as I tried to sort my communities I felt many of them did not belong with just one word. Some I put under more than one word and others I could have, but just decided not to show more than once.