Or PLEs, Mupples and PLSs. Its a bit of a mouthful. A couple of weeks ago the iCamp project came up with the idea of Mupples – Mashup Personal Learning Environments. “Mash-ups, the ‘frankensteining’ of software artefacts and data”, they say “have enabled a new generation of learning tools. Web-applications, services, and data can now be endlessly recombined, no matter where they reside.” I think this is a helpful idea. And they are organising a conference on it in September.

Now this morning comes the idea of Personalised Learning Systems. The term is used in a blog post by Ken Carroll from Praxis Language based in Shanghai. I met Hank Horkoff, the CEO, last week and was mightily impressed with the work they are doing (watch this spot for a Sounds of the Bazaar interview with Hank).

Anyway, Ken says:

“The PLS has one obsessive objective: to allow the user in every way possible to fit the learning around her own needs (rather than forcing her to conform to some outside requirements). In this sense, the PLS is consistent with Personal Learning Environments, and of course, with our own philosophy of learning on your terms. The lifelong learner simply has to have ownership/control of the learning. Perhaps the PLS would fit as a language learning toolkit within a PLE to enable that control.”

I am not so sure I like the term Personalised Learning System. But the idea makes a lot of sense in terms of using standards compliant and web 2 savvy learning provision which learners can access though the (mashup) Personal Learning Environment.