I attended a CDE event today delivered by Terry Anderson of athabasca univeristy, canada’s equivalent of the OU. The session had been advertised as blogs and social software but the focus was Personal Learning Environments (based on social software).  He described a PLE as a “web interface into the owners’ digital environment” and spoke about the institutional VLE being replaced by an institutional PLE (such as elgg) as a transitory step to individuals choosing their own PLEs.  This year he has`been teaching a class using Moodle for content, elgg, branded as me2you for blogging and making connections, elluminate for real time stuff and furl for bookmarking and sharing web resources.

Couple of quick things – Athabasca are using moodle, he mentioned some recent data on web2.0 use from the jisc spire project which might be worth a look and a strongly recommended read was Seely Brown new learning environmnts (2006).