Blogging Inside or Outside the Corporate Firewall

Stephen Downes commented on my recent post - Personal Work and Learning Environments (PWLE) - More Discussion and said -

I am opposed to the trend coming from the corporate learning side of the house to treat PLEs as work tools. What is it about people in corporate learning that they feel the need to perpetuate the attitude of servitude it seems all learners must adopt. We don't exist to work for a corporation; our learning, our minds, our most valuable asset of all, ought to serve our own purposes first and foremost. But I guess it's employers, not employees, paying the bills for corporate e-learning consultants, and they wanna hear what they wanna hear. Meanwhile - for the rest of us - the reason we call them personal learning environments is that they are indended to serve our needs, not someone else's.

It was interesting to read this because when I was writing about a PLE really also supporting my work - I didn't think of it in the context of ownership of the work product. It is an interesting issue. I'm sure that some employers would prefer to own the blog, i.e., it's a Sun Computer owned blogging system, therefore when you leave Sun you leave your content behind. I don't personally think this is the right direction for individuals and in my recent presentations on eLearning 2.0, I suggested in my examples for what this looks like in a corporate environment that people use a tool like Blogger. There's a side benefit of doing this in that you can keep the content beyond your current job. You have to make the content be somewhat generic since it's public.

I did suggest that they would either use a Wiki behind the firewall or use a password protected Wiki - because that's where the work product goes.

I didn't really consider in my presentation the implications of ownership around this content, but it feels like a natural separation given the constraints of many corporate environments.

Stephen's very much correct about a PLE being for the person. It is going to be a challenge for corporations to come to grips with the ownership of the learning if it is captured in a system. Certainly, if it's in your brain, you leave with it. If it's captured in a system inside the corporate firewall, it won't go outside. I'm sure there will be some interesting discussion around this in the future.