Grow Your Personal Learning Network
Warlick, D. (2009). Grow your personal learning network. Learning & Leading With Technology 36(6), Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/learn/publications/learning-and-leading/digital-edition-march-april-2009.aspx
Summary: The concept of personal learning networks are difficult to understand. I believe I am a person capable of learning things quickly and doing enough work to grasp any concept. When I don’t know about a specific topic or how to do something, I feel confident that with a little time and research I can figure it out. PLNs are simply put, really difficult to figure out. I am working on this and grasping it is taking a lot longer than I expected.
One of my favorite parts of this article was that Warlick said, “preparing children for an unpredictable future means helping them learn to teach themselves,” (pg. 16). This couldn’t have been said any better. In our society and with our technological advances and the uncertainty of what will come in the future, we are a culture who individually needs to learn how to ‘figure it out’. People are busy and life is so high paced now that if you want to know more about something or don’t know how to accomplish a task, sadly and rarely will others have time to talk you through it all. Children need to learn how to accomplish knowledge on their own.
In regards to PLN logistics, there are three types of PLNs that are described in this article.
1. Personally maintained synchronous connections.
- This includes people and places you consult to answer questions, solve problems, and accomplish daily goals.
- This includes chat, instant messages, text messages, teleconferencing, iChat, Skype, Twitter among others.
2. Personally and socially maintained semi-synchronous connections.
- This includes texting, facebook profiles, Twitter, group discussion boards, blogs, wikis, google docs and mailing lists, etc.
- Semi-synchronous is collaboration but does not have to happen in real time.
3. Dynamically maintained asynchronous connections.
- While the first two connect us with each other, this type of PLN connects us with sources that we think are valuable.
- This includes RSS aggregators and sites like Diigo.
Educators have to be learners as well and they need to gain and develop skills to use the tools that are available to enhance their teaching. While traditional tools like phones, chats, emails, and mailing lists are still valuable; there are many new ways to effectively accomplish gathering information through PLNs where the heart is it’s members.
Question 1: What are some examples of PLNs that are not utilized among educators as much as they should be?
A1: Although I cannot take a survey of every educator, I do know what tools are not being used that often amongst the teachers I know. These include blogs, Twitter, and Diigo. Among these, in my opinion, Diigo is a great tool to help find information that is valuable. For example, as the article points out, typing into google can return an infinite amount of resources. Typing that same subject into Diigo can return sites that others have bookmarked as valuable. It saves time and can be more effective.
Question 2: Which tool(s) would I like to utilize more as a future educator?
A2: Diigo is a very valuable tool to retrieve relative, valued information so this would definitely be one of them. The other tool I would like to utilize more would be Twitter. The chats are amazing and so valuable. Another tool I would like to use as a teacher would be a blog. It would be great to have a parent blog and a students blog where everyone could communicate with each other independently and also with me.
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