Thursday, June 14, 2007

Personal Hard Drive

Mark Oehlert made some very sparky comments as he enters into the "raging PLE debate." (I love being part of raging debates -- it's really fun, isn't it?) Mark writes,
"You wanna know what a PLE is? Its called your head."

I said a similar thing in a comment on Tony Karrer's blog the other day:
Isn't the main tool of the PLE our very own little brains? It's the best software around and completely portable. I can take it with me from job to job; from hobby-project to family life. It's personal and personalized. It's mine and a corporation can never ever own it...or can it?

Tony came back talking about all the tools he uses as an extension of his brain. This is true. We use technology for storage. But as Mark points out, that's different from "learning."

So maybe the PLE that we're all talking about here is really a Personal Hard Drive. It's a storage place for all that information. Late, we go back to our various storage facilities for all the hard-core processing we do with our brains.

Nevertheless, the storage facility does support the learning process, doesn't it.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Cammy,

I think you make a great distinction between storage and processing -- it reminds me of some of the cognitive theory, where we have to work with stuff in short-term memory both to help encode whatever the stuff is, and to be able to retrieve and work with it again later.

I used to think of live blogging as endlessly disruptive (and, if you're a non-blogger sitting next to someone relentlessly tapping away, it's as bad as that nonstop ditta-ditta-bip ditta-bip-bip from someone's headphones when you're on the subway). Then I realized I'm a constant notetaker, in the pen-and-paper sense. That's one way for me to process the information I'm seeing/hearing, and the same may be true for at least some live bloggers.

The others, of course, are just showing off.