How to Get a Good Job and Improve Your Career – With a PLE - 2nd International Workshop on Evidence-Based Technology Enhanced Learning - page 98

How to Get a Good Job and Improve Your
Career - With a PLE

Luigi Romano *

Abstract. Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) are gaining increasing interest
because they provide a flexible way to better match students' needs. The main in
using widely a PLE is the danger of the owner being unable to discriminate sound
contents from groundless or wrong ones. The paper describes an experience where
students were taught how to build a PLE in order to strengthen their understanding
of Mathematics. The paper focuses on two aspects: fostering and strengthening the
creation of critical sense in teenaged students when building their PLE, and over-
coming personal difficulties and misunderstandings about Mathematics with a
PLE. Gaining such skills will be extremely useful for improving students' personal
and working life, in a Lifelong Learning perspective.

Keywords: Personal Learning Environment, Critical Sense, Lifelong Learning,
web based Learning, Communities of Practice, OECD-PISA, Mathematics.

1 Introduction

Massive adoption of computers in Educational activities, together with the perva-
sive use of Internet, make it possible nowadays to access huge amounts of learning
materials, to the widest audience ever. Educational institutions and Companies are
exploiting these opportunities, mostly by providing to their students and em-
ployees training opportunities via resources, based on fixed contents and fixed
learning paths stored on specific portals, called Virtual Learning Environments
(VLEs).
Recently a new approach to learning over the Internet has become popular, the
so called Personal Learning Environment (PLE). PLE supports students in build-
ing their own learning path, freely exploring contents available on the Internet. In
this scenario, each learning path is modeled on each student's needs.
PLE represents a customizable and powerful alternative to VLE, but it has a
drawback: it requires much more attention about the quality of the information