Chapter 6: Network Learning Literacy: PLE and ONLE For Digital Lifelong Learning

Social media offer interaction for more radical democratic processes, tools, and spaces that promote inquiry, discourse, equity in participation, and outcomes. The open educational resources (OER) movement instigates personal learning environments (PLEs) and open network learning environments (ONLEs) that instantiate new contexts for lifelong learning (formal, nonformal, and informal) and offer more interactive, open, personal, and collaborative engagements. Nobel laureate Amartya Sen argued that increasing the freedoms that men and women enjoy is a definition of development, and greater freedom empowers people to be more effective agents of development (Commonwealth of Learning, 2012). Watts and Bridges (2006) emphasized that educators should ensure that learners are able to make choices and are supported in making the choice (their capacity to be free to choose). It is believed that digital lifelong learning is a modern learning concept to address the digital humanities. The OER movement is a belief rather than a solution for social justice and open and distance learning (ODL). The PLE and ONLE are identified as key pedagogical and instructional strategies to empower learners and deploy the freedom to choose to be and do. The ability and capability to build and to organize PLEs and ONLEs as network learning literacy for teaching and learning is not addressed or taught at any educational institution in any learning form—formal learning, nonformal learning, or informal learning. This chapter intends to address social justice and open and distance learning by proposing network learning literacy that guides learners, educators, and educational institutions to integrate personal learning environments (PLEs) and open network learning environments (ONLEs) as pedagogical and instructional strategies to prepare all learners for digital lifelong learning.