Interrelation between trust and sharing attitudes in distributed personal learning environments: The case study of LePress PLE

Abstract

This paper focuses on relations between learners' generic level of trust in online environments and their attitudes towards openness and sharing in a blog-based personal learning environment LePress. The main rationale of this study was inspired by the changes present in today's education, where the use of blogs as Personal Learning Environments is becoming an emerging trend in higher education. We claim that by understanding interrelation of trust and attitudes towards sharing within this open and flexible environments, we will be able to contribute to the design decisions regarding the LePress, which lead to increasing the participation of individuals and communities in inherent formal and informal learning processes in a number of contexts. Major contributions of this paper are towards understanding (1) the relationship between trust and teacher/learners attitudes towards sharing in a blog-based personal learning environment and (2) the correlation between users trust level and expectations towards affordances of online learning tools. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.