Today's post flows nicely from yesterday's post on one type of Personal Learning Environment, Alltop, a site where you are able to aggregate your blog interests in one area. The difference today however is that I'm writing about my very OWN personal learning environment, a personal website, michaeleury.com, that I have published only in the last few days!
OK, what is a personal learning environment? For me it is a place where I park my ideas and knowledge, links and reading resources, it is a bit like a slice of my brain on the web! I've shown the site to a few friends and ex-colleagues asking for input and one question that kept coming back was, where is the sales pitch! The answer, there is not (at least nothing that looks like one!)
The site serves many purposes, firstly in building it I have had to really think about who I am, how i see learning, which links and books have I got the most from and so on... Today on Tony Karrer's blog, eLearningTech, I saw a video of Seth Godin and Tom Peters talking about blogging, the quote that stuck in my head was, "There is nothing more important than blogging in my life". That also helps to describe why this site is a personal learning environment, it makes me examine my ideas and thoughts. The real test of an idea is having to write it down and publish it - this is real personal learning!
The second purpose of the site is that others can plug in to my ideas, readings and links and learn new things for themselves - it is my way of sharing!
Another purpose relates to branding. People visiting the site should get a much better sense of who I am, what I do, what I like, not just professionally but also personally. My business is designing learning tools and programs for business, this site helps to communicate 'where' I come from.
I hope you enjoy having a look around the site! Given that it is new I'd be open to any feedback, feel free to do that here on my blog or via the contact form on my site!
