By defining the act of reading as a form of conversation is attractive but it distorts the definition to the point of meaninglessness. If reading a book is a social act then what isn’t? It is also a useful trick for supporting the idea that learning is a social phenomenon – because there is no act that is not social. So things get tautological and meaningless.

I do see how a PLE is a solo act by definition though (defining alone as not being told what to read or when to read it or where). It does have islands of social learning though. As an individual I could spend my days just reading blogs and never commenting. By Dave’s definition this is still social learning. That’s a big difference though between writing a comment and then receiving a comment about my comment. I write comments all the time and yet, I rarely get replies and often I never go back to see if there is a reply. It feels very lonely even though I am engaging in a hypothetical audience. This feels a bit alienating to me. Perhaps with practice I will learn to get more consistent engagement but until then it would seem that an LMS would provide good training wheels so-to-speak.

I wonder if the people running this course are so engaged and embedded in the online world that they have forgotten how hard it is to get heard here. How many of us write comments without getting replies? What happens when we give up? Do people give up? Has there been research?