Personal Environments

[This is very much a work in progress]

David Dalgado has put up a graphic of his personal learning environment, using categories of Main Tool, Browser, LMS, News, Search, Communication, Knowledge base, Social Networks and Web Apps. When I examined my Web tools at the time, I came up with Main Professional Site, Information Management, Productivity Tools and Social Networks. This view was a bit different from my Personal Knowledge Management system, last year. This process consisted of Pulling, Sorting, Categorizing, Reflecting & Commenting, and Finding. In all of these cases, the individual decides what to connect to, choosing the intensity of the bonds with people or information.

Whichever view you consider, there are multiple aspects of personal learning and sense-making, enough to fill several books (or one big wiki). These new tools on the Web are making it easier to cobble together something that works for each of us. Jane Hart’s Top 100 list, shows the wide variety of tools available.

Connections, enabled by these tools, are starting to matter more in our work and our learning. We can connect with work, love, entertainment and meaning online. That’s why I’m to trying to find patterns in how these personal spaces have been created.

Mark Federman’s Valence Theory of Organization provides a most interesting lens to view our connections and I look forward to his future publications.

I identify several specific forms of valence relationships that are enacted by two or more people when they come together to do almost anything; these are economic, social-psychological, identity, knowledge, and ecological. An organization is thus defined as that complex, emergent entity which occurs when two or more people, or two or more organizations, or both, share multiple valences at various strengths, with various pervasiveness, among the component elements. Using this as a definition of organization has profoundly disruptive implications for every aspect of management, governance, and engagement that we have come to know over the last hundred or so years.

If individuals have stronger learning bonds outside school than inside, what happens to education? If there are stronger economic bonds through your network than your current job, what happens to the industrial workplace?

As we are able to connect to anyone at any time, as well as have access to information as we need it, the organisation of the past century is starting to look like a hollow shell.