Conference ICL2009 September 23 -25, 2009 Villach, Austria 1(10) Personal Learning Environment – a Conceptual Study Behnam Taraghi, Martin Ebner, Gerald Till, Herbert Mühlburger 1 Social Learning, Graz University of Technology Key words: e-learning, personal learning environment, widget, PLE Abstract: The influence of digital technologies as well as the World Wide Web on education rises dramatically. In former years Learning Management Systems (LMS) were introduced on educational institutes to address the needs both their institutions and their lecturers. Nowadays a shift from an institution-centred approach to a learner- centred one becomes necessary to allow individuality through the learning process and to think about learning strategies in general. In this paper a first approach of a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) is described. The technological concept is pointed out as well as a study about the graphical user-interface done at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz). It can be concluded that PLEs are the next generation environments, which help to improve the learning and teaching behaviour. 1 Introduction Web 2.0, first coined by Tim O’Reilly [1], changes how we interact and deal with the WorldWideWeb. Social Networking Software is growing rapidly and helps to connect people worldwide to share their thoughts, collaborate on topics of same interest and discuss in the virtual space. Of course these changes influenced the learning and teaching behaviour in a new and complete different way. Bearing in mind that learning proceeds through communication [2], Web 2.0 technologies offer much more possibilities for interaction, collaboration and conversation. Mixing and connecting content by using the MashUp principle will allow learners to build their own learning environment, which is described by Stephen Downes [3] as “future learning environment which becomes not an institutional or corporate application, but also a learning center, where content is reused and remixed according to the student’s own needs and interests. It becomes, indeed, not a single application, but a collection of interoperating applications – an environment rather than a system”. At the TU Graz (Graz University of Technology) research work is taking place to investigate how so called PLEs (Personal Learning Environments) can improve the daily learning and teaching behaviour. Therefore a closer look must be taken to address to the core issues. Wilson [4] expressed the user-centred philosophy of PLEs and Harmelen [5] agreed by pointing out that traditional LMSs (Learning Management Systems) are not flexible enough or are not addressing to the individual needs of a specific learner. A further approach is the use of common, internet based Social Software as mentioned in some other research [6] [22] to create an individual pool of information and knowledge. The implementation of own systems became interesting and necessary, not only because of the learner’s arbitrariness but lots of problems concerning service stability, accessibility and data protection have been occurring. Nevertheless own systems often need high effort and technical support [7] [8]. ICL 2009 Proceedings - Page 997