Personal Learning Knowledge Work Environment

I've been reading a lot over the past few months around Personal Learning Environments and a lot of related material. What sparks this post is the combination of a recent post by Stephen Downes that includes a brief exchange with Jay Cross in the comments and some interesting discussions in the Enterprise 2.0 world that included a post by Bill Ives - Managing Personal Knowledge: Setting a Foundation for Transformation? In it, he points out that a stepping stone to Enterprise 2.0 adoption is getting folks to manage their personal knowledge and adopt practices like blogging for personal knowledge management (PKM) and personal learning.

What this has come to make me realize is that for the vast majority of knowledge workers (including myself), there should be no separation between my Personal Learning Environment (PLE), my Personal Knowledge Management system, and my day-to-day set of tools that enhance my knowledge worker productivity. Learning-Knowledge-Work - they really are the same and I need to do them all at once. (See also Knowledge Work Not Separate from Learning). As I compose this blog post, which am I doing? All.

Maybe there are some distinctions between personal knowledge management, personal learning and knowledge productivity. I can't claim that I really understand these distinctions, but I can say with certainty that systems or environments that provide support for these need to operate together. If you make these independent and distinct, it will be really annoying for us knowledge workers.

So, any suggestion on what the name for this system (or environment) should be? Certainly PLE and PKM would seem to be too limited, right?

And, if there's really only one environment, then what's in it?

For now, my sense is that we are all experimenting with different solutions pulled together from different tools. Take a look at a few of the following for examples:

• My Personal Learning Environment
• Ray's Personal Learning Environment
• Reaching Nirvana in my Personal Learning Environment
• Personal Learning Environments - the future of eLearning?
• Personal Learning
  

These would seem to be summed up pretty well by Graham Attwell in Questions and Answers on Peronal Learning Environments:

Yes, I do have my own PLE, comprised of a ‘mash up’ of different desktop and web based applications I use for my everyday work and increasingly reliant on local and web based services. It isn’t particularly efficient and it has some pretty big gaps at the moment – but I hope to develop it further over the next year. Central to my PLE is the people I work with and the applications I use for communication with those people.

There's been quite a bit of other discussion around what these things might be:

• PLEs - what are we talking about here?
• Personal Learning Environments (PLEs)
• Personal Learning Environments and personal learning environments
• My Personal Learning Environment

And if those aren't enough you can go to PLE Links and the PLE Wiki.

One thing that I'm left wondering is how this is different from all the discussion around productivity.

For me it's become more a question of the day-to-day processes I use on top of these tools and how the tools have adjusted how I do things. My life is different now than before I used an RSS reader and wrote a blog. It's also different since I adopted the practice of taking notes only on my laptop and heavy use of desktop search instead of trying organize things as much.

I'm not sure how to make sense of all of this yet, but I know things have changed and I'm not sure that discussing Personal Learning Environments separate from the rest of these changes is helping me.