Building Personal Learning Environments by using and mixing ICT tools in a professional way

Abstract

This paper reports on a teaching experience of the introduction of ICT to higher education students in a complementary professional approach and a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) development approach, as well as a naturalistic study based on this experience. The central focus of this methodology was the use of hands-on sessions to introduce students to somespecific ICT tools, and exploring the building process of an awareness abouttheir Personal Learning environments.In terms of learning, we confirmed that students very much appreciate new ways of developing their tasks and their course work. Even when the great majority of students associates learning with acquiring only information and some of them associate learning with memorizing.
In terms of Technology, after this experience we can conclude that students,
when arriving at university, have no experience –even knowledge- in the use
of ICT tools. In addition, students from the first year of the degree don’t think
they use Web 2.0 (awareness), and even more, they don’t believe that they
can use ICT tools for learning, even if they actually do. They value, useful
tools which help them to plan their tasks, save time, simplify complicated
tasks and, definitively, have fun; but also they specially value the ICT tools
they discovered, seeing opportunities for Independency, collaboration, self importance in the learning process.
The vast majority of students have a basic perception of their PLE. Few of
them don’t relate tools with themselves but with their tasks, and only some of
them go one step further by establishing more complex relationships between
tools, contents, tasks and themselves enriching each other.