Harnessing Collective Intelligence in Personal Learning Environments

The Personal Learning Environment (PLE) driven approach to learning suggests a shift in emphasis from a teacher driven knowledge-push to a learner driven knowledge pull learning model. One concern with knowledge-pull approaches is knowledge overload. Thus, there is a crucial need for knowledge filters to help learners cope with the problem of knowledge overload. In this paper, we present the details of PLEM as a Web 2.0 driven service for personal learning management, which acts as a knowledge filter for learning. The primary aim of PLEM is to harness the collective intelligence and leverage social filtering methods to help learners find quality knowledge nodes that can populate their PLEs.