Linking PLEs with VLEs

Perhaps not surprisingly then, not a great deal has been done to connect PLEs and VLEs. Against this background, the JISC-funded RAMBLE Project [6] undertook to develop some linkage between PLEs and VLEs, so that at least the blogging activities could be imported into the VLE context. Thus RAMBLE's brief was to investigate the use of blogs as a reflective authoring activity in an educational context through two strands of work:

1. The off-line authoring of blog entries on a PDA and subsequent upload to a blog server.
2. The creation of a blogging component that will allow blog content to be integrated into the Bodington VLE [11].

The project recognised that there are existing patterns of activity that ought to be very amenable to blogging - such as the habit of Short Message Service (SMS) text messaging, which can be any place, any time. Hence, in order to best realise working off site, the blogging was made mobile, i.e. participants each authored a 'moblog', where: 'A mobile weblog, or moblog, consists of content posted to the Internet from a mobile device, such as a cellular phone or PDA' [12].

Technical choices had to be made very quickly: after brief investigation, two kinds of PDA-based blogging clients were chosen, one using the Microsoft Pocket PC operating system and the other using Palm OS, which at the time were the two most popular platforms. Each device was also supplemented with a wireless infra-red foldaway keyboard, which was essential to support more than token input. The content was subsequently submitted to a blog hosting service ('blog server') on the Web via synchronisation with a networked desktop PC.

Most of the requirements were drawn from moblogging exercises undertaken by two groups of Oxford undergraduates (Year 1 Chemistry, and Year 5 Medical Sciences). It is worth noting that they were given short and simple briefs - the first group was to give feedback on lecture courses, tutorials and practicals, while the other was to record their learning experiences while on a clinical rotation. The blogs were authored over a period of a month or so, generally a couple of entries submitted each week. In addition, a project blog was maintained through the project period of about 6 months [13].

Particular attention was given to privacy. Most blogs, even personal diaries, are viewable by the public, but in the personal learning context, this is not always appropriate. These requirements made it really necessary to have control over the blog server in-house. So access to the blogs was set up so that there was only one owner per blog and the only others who could read and respond to the blogs were their peers plus the blog project supervisor and RAMBLE project team.