@Chris you make a compelling argument (as per usual) “engaging in connective activities automatically creates a PLE” I’m still stuck wondering if the title itself is what’s bothering me. I think i see what your saying, but the idea of “personal” calls to mind a binder that lives on a shelf. It is MINE. I wonder if we just think that way because we’re accustomed to it.
It’s that implicit only (and I believe i’ve heard both George and Stephen use it explicitly) that makes the PLE difficult. I think that’s one of the issues i was trying to tease out. Sounds like the Neo-platonic Nous. Must go back and read my plotinus.

@george i think i understand what you mean… but then why call it personal? That’s the thing that i keep coming back to… in what sense is it personal? It tends to sound more like a desperate attempt to keep our enlightenment sense of the individual and not open ourselves to the fact that the things that we know are indelibly connected to everything else and are not, in fact, personal at all. In the sense that there are ‘no new ideas’ what we think of as personal are in fact just brand choices.

@Nicola those resources are just manifestation of things done by people. One of the problems i’ve had with certain parts of the OER movement for instance is the desire to blandify things so that they are reusable, attempting to take the human context out of it. I don’t think the attempt entirely succeeds, but it to is often premised in the idea that knowledge is countable and the human can be taken out of a situation leaving rarified knowledge behind.

@Dan I work (in my day job) on the corporate side of academia, so i have some sense of what you’re talking about. You are, i believe, omitting a key part of connectivism in your definition. I think the how of connectivism is inherently tied to the what… that’s the whole point of the theory. You are, of course, more than welcome to make the distinction, but I’m not sure you are then talking about connectivism.

@everyone I can’t think of a theory (outside, maybe, of postmodernism, which isn’t really a theory) of knowledge or otherwise, that offers itself up to so many interpretations from people who claim to be members of the brand. Maybe the lesson here is that connectivism allows itself to be different things to different people, as is the nature of connected networks and the ways that people touch the knowledge residing in the network.