Web 2.0 and PLE

I wrote a paper for a masters course and I thought it was good enough to post excerpts. I posted it on my blog at Athabasca University's Me2U site. Here are the links:

• Web 2.0 (http://me2u.athabascau.ca/thomass/weblog/1199.html)
  
  
• Personal Learning Environment (PLE)
  (http://me2u.athabascau.ca/thomass/weblog/1200.html)
  
  
• References (http://me2u.athabascau.ca/thomass/weblog/1197.html)
  

My conclusion is that advances in Web 2.0 technologies are making the development of PLEs more of a possibility, but harnessing everything into one centralized portal is a challenge that will need to be met to make it a reality.

I would like to see PLEs take advantage of the approach of sites like Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/) and applications like Firefox (http://www.mozilla.org/) that allow a user to add or remove applications/add-ons to improve functionality. It should also be flexible enough to allow learners to utilize it in formal, educational, settings, but this would be difficult from the institution's perspective.