My PLE and its future

I believe PLE is a two way thing. It is connects the learner and the educator. It should be flexible and due to its flexibility would be able to reach out to different learning styles and taste of the learners. For educators it should be a ‘tool’ that will assist them in delivering the content needed for the subject taught but it shall not delimit the learning experience. How do I describe my PLE? I have been using the computer and internet for 9 years and have learnt some things on the way. From my first e-mail to my first iGoogle it has changed my way of learning and hope so in the near future teaching. Before enrolling in this course I knew about:

Office application: Microsoft Office application, Open Office application

Some statistical softwares: Minitab, SPSS, Microsoft Excel (although primary a spreadsheet program but we can perform some statistical test in it)

E-mail: Yahoo-mail, Gmail, Hotmail, Lovemail (not active anymore).

Internet web browsers: internet explorer, Netscape navigator, Firefox, Safari

Chatting: Mirc, Yahoo-chat

Download manager: Download manager, Orbit

Messenger services: Yahoo messenger, MSN messenger

File sharing programs: I use bittorrent

Movie editing software: Windows Movie Maker

Maps: Google earth, Google maps

Phylogenetic softwares: Chromas, PAUP, MacClade, MEGA, DAMBE

Software for engineering drawing: Catia (learnt it from my brother; an Aircraft Design Engineer)

Search engines: Google search, MSN search, Yahoo search

Social networking: Friendster, Facebook (have an account but was not active), Hi5

RSS readers: came together with my internet explorer

Pic editing tools: primarily MsPaint but have tried Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator

From what is listed here we can see that these are tools that I have been already using for a period of time to perform specific functions.

What is extra that I learnt during the whole course of CENL2008? Which tool could be used as a lifelong learning asset?

E-mail: Gmail can be incorporated with its other Google applications and can be used for chatting also.

Internet web browsers: I’ve heard that Firefox is a great web browser as it can incorporate various applications like download managers etc but I have not tried it.

Chatting: My knowledge in this area has changed abit as I discovered that other applications can also do so like Facebook and Friendster not to mention the messenger services.

Movie editing software: Windows Movie Maker can be incorporated with other softwares like Audacity and Autoscreen Recorder to make useful tutorials and can be posted in blogs (view my catch intro), youtube and metacafe.

Audio editing software: Audacity

Podcasting service: I use Gcast

Search engines: Google search, MSN search, Yahoo search all these searches can be also be used as RSS that can be read in an RSS reader (this is where iGoogle comes in)

Social networking: Friendster (not so active), Facebook (have an account and is active). Also joined and is currently managing another social networking site ning.com. I am managing a group called eRuai Zoology, a group effort initiated by Prof. Dr Mohd Tajuddin Abdullah from UNIMAS (My supervisor for my MSc and is currently my close associate in Zoology related research; please do visit the site http://borneozoology.ning.com/).

RSS readers: came together with my internet explorer but now have Google Reader and iGoogle. I prefer iGoogle as it is very interactive and you can add any page with xml in it. I can do a lot of things in it like monitor new papers/research that is being in press or look at any changes/comments in my other included pages (ning.com, podcast, news from BBC, my blog etc)

Wikis: where we can contribute together knowledge in a particular subject

Social bookmarking: using Delicious; I can now tag websites/info and share it with my students. This is particularly useful as they can read what I have I can gain access to what they have. Its like we teach and they learn vice versa. The best thing this tool can also be incorporate in iGoogle again.

Microblogging: using twitter not too much to say as I have already talked about it in my blog.

Potentially the iGoogle and social bookmarking has a great potential as I will be using it very often in my courses/lectures/final year projects in the future. I have been chatting with my students prior to this course, have been managing social networking group (http://borneozoology.ning.com). Incidentally I have been doing Google search and accessing help from softwares more often than I do (I have been doing this) so there is nothing new there. Well my personal learning environment is very flexible and I always like to explore new tools (or for me its toys) like the ToolBook software that was just recently promoted at UCSI University recently (pretty nippy tool) and so it should be with my students.