Self Regulated Learning

Self regulated learning is a topic of interest to me because of several of my past experiences. I have found myself to be more motivated when I have some say in the way that I go about learning on a subject. In personal life, I have often used social media, especially youtube for learning about a number of things such as lifestyle, fitness, cosmetics, and even documentaries of interesting subjects. I have learned a lot of information and even used the same method when it comes to my future career through the us of LinkedIn. So when one of the articles discussed these types of ideas, it was inetersting to learn about how self regulated learning is promoted through the concept of PLEs. 

Dabbagh et al., the authors suggest how personal learning environments (PLEs) can be utilized in both formal and informal learning when it comes to the educational context. What is especially appealing to this approach is the control aspect from the students' end on how they go about this learning process. This is he direction that instructors need to consider when finding ways of engaging the modern students who are growing within a technology heavy environment. 

While this idea of learning is appealing for many reasons, something that I think about is the motivation factor for students. Unless a student is truly interested in a subject, the effort they will put behind their learning may be limited to just completing the instructor's requirements. Finding ways to regulate and evaluate this method will be useful to get more insight into the extent to which it's helpful for student's learning in certain environments.