Personal Learning Environments for Physiotherapists

There is much talk about the Personal Learning Environments (PLE) in the e-learning world and how they may influence the future of our education system.

A PLE is:

a system that helps learners take control of and manage their own learning. This includes methods for learners to set their own learning goals, manage their learning, manage both content and process, and communicate with others in the process of learning.

In contrast, a virtual learning environment (VLE) or learning management system (LMS), such as Blackboard or Moodle which are used in educational institutions, is:

a software system designed to help teachers by facilitating the management of educational courses for their students, especially by helping teachers and learners with course administration. The system can often track the learners’ progress, which can be monitored by both teachers and learners.

Notice the difference? A VLE/LMS is all about controlling how you learn. A PLE is about giving you control over how you learn.  It allows for personal or autonomous learning that is learner driven, problem based and motivated by interest.  This is currently a challenging concept in the education system but very relevant to continuing education, professional development and lifelong learning.  PLEs have the potential to support lifelong learning based on the idea that learning will take place in different contexts and situations and will not be provided by a single provider.

The PLE is a concept, not a product.  It is a concept based on a collection of loosely coupled Web 2.0 tools and social software which may be used for working, learning, reflection and collaboration with others.  A PLE uses what ever devises the learner chooses to use and may be composed of one or more sub-systems, such as a desktop application or one or more web-based services.  For example my PLE is a combination of my Netvibes feed aggregator and Tweetdeck, my Twitter client.

My Netvibes feedreader delivers information to me by RSS feeds including journal updates, physiotherapy news, e-learning news, e-health news, Physiopedia updates and recent activity in my social networks (Facebook and LinkedIn).  Whereas Tweetdeck tells me what my Twitter buddies are chatting about and information that they are recommending to each other.  I take the information from these two sources, digest, reflect and act .  My actions might involve adding new news, research or other pertinent information to Physiospot, writing new articles or adding new evidence to Physiopedia or sharing, communicating and collaborating with people in my networks.  From these actions I learn, every day,  I am continually professionally developing.

The opportunity is there for us all to make the most of new web technology for our ongoing learning and development, are you making the most of this opportunity?  What is your PLE?

Read an interesting history of the PLE here.

Keeping your professional physiotherapy portfolio

For physiotherapy professionals it is really important these days to keep a portfolio of all our learning and development, indeed in some countries such as the UK it is a requirement for our professional registration.  In an old post on CPD that I wrote for my first CPD series I talked about the learning activities that can be regarded as part of professional development.  New web technology has added a few activities to this list but also provided us with the opportunity to record our learning activities, store evidence and keep a portfolio on-line.

There are formal providers of on-line portfolios such as Pebble Pad (as provided to members of the CSP) however as I mentioned in my last post blogging is also a very effective and suitable method. WordPress or Blogger offer us an easy way to instantly set up a free blog and immediately start recording our personal learning and professional development. How do we do this?  For each learning experience you should follow these steps:

1. Write a summary of the learning experience details which should include a description of the actual experience, when it occurred, where it occurred, who else was involved and how many hours it took to complete.
2. Record the actual learning outcome of your learning experience. These may fulfil or be slightly different to the learning objectives that you had planned in relation to your learning needs or they may be incidental following an unplanned learning experience.
3. After this your reflections on your learning experience should be documented.
4. You might then want to make links between your learning and research evidence to prove development of your evidence based practice.  The integration of research evidence into your practice provides a more solid foundation for your practice.
5. Then try to link your learning outcomes to other standards such as competency frameworks, professional standards and service targets to enable you to easily refer back to learning activities completed that will support processes such as proof of competence or professional body registration for example.

It is also possible with free and open software, such as WordPress, that is available these days to make our own websites and build our entire portfolio, CV and professional presence on-line.  This is a good way of globally promoting ourselves, our work and our brand, but remember if making this public to always bear in mind the importance of being professional on-line.

If your wondering about how to go about continually professional developing have a look at my old CPD series.

Web technology, autonomous learning and professional development in physiotherapy

New web technology has given us the opportunity to take independent control of our learning and professional development.  Traditionally our professional development has arisen from face to face courses, however now we can choose what, when and how we learn in a time and cost effective way. Here are some of the free options that I use every day that are available to us all:

• Sign up to RSS feeds of your favourite journals and create RSS feeds in PubMed for your particular areas of interest
• Sign up to a feed aggregator to collect your RSS feeds
• Start a blog, you can keep this private or make it public and get your mentors/colleagues to comment
• Create a Physiopedia account
• Read and review articles of interest from your RSS feeds and comment on them on your blog or add new evidence to Physiopedia.
• Listen to podcasts in your redundant time such as during your commute to work, comment on new things you have learned in your blog or add new evidence to Physiopedia
• Connect with like minded colleagues on Twitter and LinkedIn, blog about connections and collaborations that emerge
• Follow like minded colleagues recommendations on content communities and blog about new and interesting information that you come across
• Follow Facebook pages of your favourite physiotherapy organisations and blog about new information or record it in Physiopedia
• Write new evidence based articles in Physiopedia to contribute your knowledge and work to the profession
• Collect interesting articles that you come across in Zotero or Mendeley and share them with your colleagues
• Keep an on-line portfolio, this can easily be done with a personal blogging tool by recording all your new learning activities mentioned above!

As you can see this list has a bias towards blogging and contributing to Physiopedia.  This is because I firmly believe that these are the best ways to contribute to our own learning.  Blogging is a great reflective tool as well as a place to store information, and a wiki such as Physiopedia (the only physiotherapy specific wiki) is a good place to collate, develop and contribute your knowledge.

Can you think of any other good ways to use technology for perssonal learning and professional development?