Philippe distinguishes between a personal information environment and a personal learning environment. [I know that in this case a personal learning environment isn’t just everything around me when I’m learning, but is a personalised form of a VLE. In that case, what is a personal information environment? Is it all the sources from which I gain information? In which case it seems to me the same as my learning network.]

Personal information environment = learning network?

Twitter supports a read/write loop. It shows us what we have done and what we can do next. The function of a re-tweet is to spread information to another community. When we retweet, are we spreading the information or are we aiming at reducing the information gap in our own community? [I’m not sure what an information gap is. Also, I think this view assumes a particular type of Twitter user, who has selected and weeded both the people they follow and their followers. Other Twitter users have different models – they follow everyone who follows them, or they try to collect as many followers as possible. One function of a retweet is to spread the information, another is to establish yourself as a good source of information, another is to open up the possibility of new ties between your readers and the writer you are retweeting).

(MUPPLE seminar – Philippe Dessus, Grenoble)