Alan set me some homework while I am frittering my time away at home this summer. He wanted to know if my PLE at work and at home were different. I have actually concluded that they are not different from each other at all. I am not sure what to think about that. Perhaps it tells me that I need to get some interest outside of work!

However, it did start me thinking about my first ventures into thinking about the tools I used online as a PLE. I started a wikispaces wiki, jople (natty name eh?!) mainly to play with wikispaces, but mostly in response to Alan’s tutorial on PLEs. I came up with something that looked like this:

Jo's PLE in January 2008

I thought I would redraw it. Only 7 months later, I was quite amazed by how it had changed…

Jo's PLE July 2008

When drawing this second PLE, the main thing that struck me (and that I had trouble conveying in the diagram, I am a bulleted list kinda girl), is that there are many more connections between the tools I am using now. Flock has been instrumental in this, helping me to bring lots of different strands together. Start ingof this blog, and others, has also changed the way I use delicious to create RSS feeds on particular topics. Pulling an RSS feed into google reader from my delicious network has been extremely interesting and provided a real wealth of information that I haven’t accessed before.

Of course, the biggest change has been using twitter. Without it, I doubt I would have discovered or used half of the new tools I now use regularly.

p.s using Zemanta Firefox extension for WP on this post. It is tremendously cool. I found it reviewed on Doug’s blog that I started reading because I followed Doug on twitter.

Alan Cann and Nigel Gibson have both blogged about how TALMOS have threatened blogger Doug Belshaw for making unfavourable comments about their product on What:

What a poor commercial move by a company looking to sell to the education sector. In education we generally like to learn from our mistakes, criticism is part of the learning process. It is a shame that TALMOS doesn’t have an educational ethos as a company.

I have finally realised that I need somewhere to put all the stuff I am accumulating online and in my head. In order to preach web 2.0, I need to do it. While I started a blog to provide support to the School of Biological Sciences, I have noticed that there are more things I would like to record my thoughts about online, but they don’t necessarily fit in to that support role. I am hoping that this will fill the gap and that I can keep up regular posting! We’ll see.