Evolving a Social Networking Platform into a Smart Personalised Learning Environment (PLE) or the Other Way Around: Your Choice?

The future of learning environments lies with the merging of the better aspects of Learning Management Systems LMS, with those popularised in Social Networking platforms, to personalise the individual learning experience in a PLE Personal Learning Environment. After examining the details of a particularly flexible LMS, followed by the investigation of several key data structures behind the Facebook social networking platform, this paper then demonstrates how such a merging can be done at the conceptual schema level, and presents a list of novel features that it then enables.