Abstract: The basic idea of Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) has been well accepted and supported but its design and implementation is still a huge challenge. The EU co-funded project ROLE (role-project.eu) is upon the first to deliver and test real implementations to empower learners in taking control over their own learning processes. This paper presents two PLE concepts the ROLE project is currently experimenting with: the first one is a widget-based PLE approach (ROLE widget store including the test environment iGoogle), the second one is an Firefox Add-on based PLE approach (called PAcMan). The contributions of this paper are two-folded: (1) an evaluation design based on a participatory research method with students at the University of Vienna, and (2) the evaluation results showing how far the prototype development has converged towards the PLE theory. In this evaluation the students firstly have been introduced to the theory of PLEs, afterwards they explored and tested the ROLE prototypes. The finally ensuing systematic evaluation included a comparison between the theoretical idea of PLEs and the developed prototypes as well as a comparison between the two PLE prototypes. The results show that PLE theory and practice tend to converge but important aspects still reveal a big gap. One significant insight this paper provides is, that triggered by using the PLE prototypes, students work less with pre-selected and delivered content but are instead very active regarding searching, selecting, testing, evaluating, deciding, aggregating, organising, assembling, designing and administrating web-resources. One significant insight this paper provides is, that triggered by using the PLE prototypes, students work less with pre-selected and delivered content but are instead very active regarding searching, selecting, testing, evaluating, deciding, aggregating, organising, assembling, designing and administrating web-resources. A second insight is, that the students are still uncertain if they like the new way, but they for sure strongly request to be efficiently supported by personal learning environments. They want to be enabled to rate and judge the quality of the offered learning bundles and widgets in order to efficiently decide and select web-resources that are most valuable for their individual needs. This might be the biggest challenge of further prototype development.

2. Abstract