PLEs, or Personal Learning Environments, are being discussed all over the place.  The blog eLearning and Deliberate Moments defines PLEs this way:

“a Personal Learning Environment is a facility for an individual to access, aggregate, configure and manipulate digital artifacts of their ongoing learning experiences”

This is an interesting definition. How does this facility look technically in a corporate setting? Is it a portal with links to an LMS, to online communities relevant to the user, to the user’s blog, etc? Does it provide a way to publish and share the aggregated artifacts? Does it provide a way for other learners to edit the published artifacts?

Even more importantly, if we build it will the users come (and use it)? Michelle Martin over at the Bamboo Project has this post  that talks about  how knowledge workers now hold the means of production in their heads. I think this is a good point, and explains information seeking behavior of some people in a corporate environment.

If knowledge is power, and you have more company or technical knowledge than anyone else in your organization, aren’t you more powerful if you keep your knowledge to yourself? If you are in charge of knowledge workers, is it better to control them by convincing them the only way to learn is to consume what you have laid out in a carefully crafted curriculum?

I think not only the way we design training needs to evolve, but also the way corporate training is consumed by learners has to change. I think knowledge workers need to actively search for information,  and we need to design instruction so the learners are supported in that search.