I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the phenomenon of the PLE (personal learning environment)  and why there’s so much discussion around it. This is a question that might only come from a novice perspective, maybe. (This isn’t the quesiton yet, it’s at the end of this post.)

And I’ve been thinking about all these gadgets in my house, and my purse, and my car and the fact that they are all only the receivers of different data channels. These include my TV, DVD player, numerous computers, my smart phone, my digital cameras and digital recorders, my scanner, the antenna on the roof, the radio and stereo, the house phones. This variety of receivers is keeping me away from ebooks for now. Come on! Another single purpose gadget. Really?

Then I thought, AHA!!! That’s why we need to have something like a PLE map, so that we have  a physical representation of what we want in a universal media channel. And then I thought about Symbaloo and realized that what those tools, and my iGoogle to some extent, are attempting to do is to collect all of these disparate data streams into a more universal channel. But what we’ve got is a scrapbook of data feeds. . . for now.

Then I wondered about how we would then add in the human to human interaction and realized that once I took notes about conversations and digitized them, I added in my human to human records. Or I used my digital phone and recorded the conversation and tagged it. So smell, taste and touch are out for now, but that’s about it. Anything that we see and hear can be digitized (and often is).

What is my role then as libarian of my personal knowledge? How long does it take me to weed out the junk and catalog the rest? Is this what I also rely on PLE-type services to provide for me? Is this where we get to avatars?

So is all of this coversation about PLEs merely a precursor to a gadget that receives universal media streams? Is this what a really good netbook becomes?