When academics speak of ‘learning spaces’ and ‘learning platforms’, what kind of spaces are they evoking? When they use the term ‘personalisation’, who and what kind of people are they implicating in the personal? If we stop to consider these questions, it soon becomes apparent that personal learning platforms are inescapably ideological spaces, in which the student (often now framed as ‘the learner’), is tacitly modelled. But, since their pervasive introduction in the mid-2000s, online learning platforms have evolved into mechanisms not only for teaching, but increasingly as stages for the management of the academic self.