Lately I‘ve been fascinated by the concept of personal learning environments. As an instructional designer and trainer, I‘ve spent a lot of time trying to develop learning experiences for other people. But through my own personal experiences with Web 2.0 tools, as well as my ongoing belief in constructivist theories of learning, I‘ve come to believe that the future of staff development lies in our ability to go beyond structured training to facilitating informal processes and learning experiences that occur on a daily basis. While there may always be a place for very structured "event-based" learning, I think that we can get more "bang for our buck" if we think about how to help staff use a variety of tools to construct their own learning experiences.
