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It seems fair to say that in recent years the notion of “Personal Learning Environments” (PLEs) emerged mainly as a sort of counter-concept to the centralised provision of institutionally owned and controlled landscapes of tools and services in formal education. Fundamentally, it allowed its proponents to address and question the severe limitations of the mainstream approach to the mediation of teaching and studying activities with digital technologies. The emergence and growing dissemination of loosely-coupled, networked tools and services and their surrounding practices in particular inspired some scholars to speculate about a transformation of the monolithic, centralised systems that dominated and are still dominating formal education. Downes (2005), for example wrote: “The e-learning application, therefore, begins to look very much like a blogging tool. It represents one node in a web of content, connected to other nodes and content creation services used by other students. It becomes … a personal learning center, where content is reused and remixed according to the student's own needs and interests. It becomes, indeed, not a single application, but a collection of interoperating applications - an environment rather than a system” (section on “E-Learning 2.0).
Looking back two years later Downes (2007) reflected that “through 2005 and 2006, the concept of the Personal Learning Environment (PLE) slowly began to take form in the educational technology community, coalescing with a ‘Future VLE’ diagram released by CETIS’s Scott Wilson” (p. 19).
Indeed, retrospectively it appears that the visual representation of Wilson’s Future Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) (Wilson, 2005) served as a sort of anchor for the discourse on Personal Learning Environments for quite some time. According to Severance et al. (2008) the CETIS (Centre for Educational Technology & Interoperability Standards) group however, traces some of the ideas that drove the early stage of this discourse to an unpublished paper by Oliver and Liber (2001).
Be that as it may, Johnson et al. (2006) suggested that over the years the discourse gradually developed around a number of foci that can be interpreted as an expression of a desire for:
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Greater personal ownership of technology and data
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More effective ways of managing technological tools and services
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The integration of technologically mediated activities across all aspects of life
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A removal of barriers to the use and combination of tools and services
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Mediated collaboration and co-creation
We will argue later in this paper that these “desires” actually occur in a specific socio-historic context and that they can also be read as an expression of a rising contradiction experienced in various activity systems and in formal education in particular.