Fwd: PLE Conference in Melbourne - Invitation and pls spread to your networks

[Sarah Stewart]

FYI

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Joyce Seitzinger <j.seit...@deakin.edu.au>
Date: Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 7:45 PM
Subject: PLE Conference in Melbourne - Invitation and pls spread to your networks
To: Joyce Seitzinger <j.seit...@deakin.edu.au>

Dear friends & colleagues,

I'm writing to invite you to submit a proposal to the PLE Conference, held at Deakin University, 11-13 July 2012, and of course in the hope that you can join us. I'd also like to ask if you can help spread the word about this conference at your institutions and to your networks in Australia, New Zealand and beyond.

The conference focuses on Personal Learning Networks and will be held simultaneously in Melbourne and in Aveiro, Portugal. Today we were very pleased to announce our two Melbourne keynote speakers: Dr Alec Couros and Dr Inger Mewburn 

http://pleconf.org/melbourne-keynotes-dr-alec-couros-and-dr-inger-mewburn-join-us-pleconf/

The conference is still accepting abstracts for refereed papers until 31st March 2012. Beyond that we will also be looking at other formats for sharing ideas and furthering thinking about personal learning environments and networked learning.

More information about the conference can be found at http://pleconf.org and I have included a short blurb below. Naturally you can follow the active twitter stream with the hashtag #pleconf.

Thank you, kind regards and I hope to see you in July!

Joyce Seitzinger

Lecturer in Blended Learning

Deakin University

Faculty of Health / Faculty of Science & Technology

Twitter: @catspyjamasnz

Skype: joyceseitzinger

Blog: www.cats-pyjamas.net

Work phone: 03 92446066

Why a PLE Conference?

Higher education is being challenged on many fronts. Technologies are changing, students are changing, industry and research demands are changing. We adopt mobile learning strategies, new Learning Management Systems, new learning theories and new cloud technologies, but all of it with the aim of providing students with a flexible, relevant and personalized learning experience.

 

One method of achieving this, while maintaining room for growth and flexibility, is to facilitate students and staff in the adoption of a personal learning environment. A Personal Learning Environment (PLE) includes the tools, communities, and services that constitute individual educational platforms that learners use to direct their own learning and pursue their educational goals. This represents a shift towards a model of learning, where students draw connections from a growing matrix of online and offline resources that they select and organise. Some of these technologies can be institutional, like the LMS, portfolios and library resources, others may live in the cloud. Some of these communities can be institutional in the form of classes or tutorial groups, others can be external.

 

The PLE Conference is dedicated to research that examines the concepts of personal learning environments, what role they play in formal and informal learning and how higher education institutions can leverage the power of PLEs.

 

To gain something of the flavor of the last conferences search for #PLE_BCN and #PLE_SOU and see http://pleconference.citilab.eu/ and http://www.pleconf.org/2011.

--
Sarah Stewart
EdD Student and Consultant
http://sarah-stewart.blogspot.com
Skype: sarah.m.stewart
Twitter: SarahStewart
+64 27 7379998