Beyond the Personal Learning Environment: attachment and control in the classroom of the future

The Personal Learning Environment (PLE) has been presented in a number of guises over a period of 10 years as an intervention which seeks the reorganisation of educational technology through shifting the “locus of control” of technology towards the learner. In the intervening period to the present, a number of initiatives have attempted to create or instil the dispositions of technologically empowered personal learning, to varying levels of success, but none of which have been conclusive. At the same time, developments in education and learning technology have indicated some deficiencies in the models and rationale that was used to justify the PLE. In this paper, the cybernetic model of the PLE presented through the Joint Information Services Committee PLE project is re-inspected in the light of (a) evidence from implementation; (b) changes in technology infrastructure. A refined model is presented, enriching the cybernetic argument about the control of personal tools with Bowlby's related cybernetic model of attachment. The refined model is situated against the impact of the fast-emerging real-time web, and the approach justified with reference to a computer simulation of the dynamics of the new model.