Personal Learning Networks - What are they anyway?

To me it is the network I am creating with my online presence. It is the many people who have decided to follow me on twitter and those I have decided to follow. It’s the really cool teacher from Wisconsin that liked my blog and keeps in touch. It is my wiki, my network is becoming a part of my everyday living. It helps me stay informed and it helps me to learn. The constant rate at which I am receiving information that is of interest to me and it’s all great. My network allows me to expand my thinking and better yet, when I am unsure of something or need an answer, I can go to my network. These many people who comprise my network are experts in many fields and have many answers and resources that they are more than happy to share. Thank goodness for my network, because with technology evolving so quickly I just can’t always keep up.

For students and schools this network could be such a valuable resource. It will help them to find relevant information quickly, it will allow them to make connections with people and content and allow them the possibility for other points of view. As teacher’s we really can only teach so much, we only have so much time and knowledge. Does it not make sense that personal learning networks would benefit our students immensely? They are learning from other people, they are blogging and getting many different takes, thoughts and ideas to expand upon. Learning does not essential end, but continues. Students could make connections as well as know exactly where to go to get the knowledge or content that they need. PLNs can only increase our student’s knowledge, it is one of the most powerful resources we could teach/ give them.

For an interesting read on personal learning networks and communities, check out “Learning Ecology, Communities and Networks; Extending the classroom” by George Siemens. The article is dated five years ago but is still quite enlightening in comparison with the other articles, blogs and podcasts I have found on the subject. For a great podcast, check out Professional Learning Networks; Online Professional Development by Jeff Utecht.

Web 2.0 and Personal Learning Networks

I'm adding more thoughts on the article“Web 2.0 a Social Movement” by William Birdsall. In reading the article again, I found the following:

“Web 2.0 has increased the participatory role given to users of the Web in its development and use. Tim O’Reilly, who is often given credit for coining the term Web 2.0, talks about development principles that include: “an architecture of participation;” “harnessing collective intelligence;” “rich user experience;” “trusting users as co-developers;” development in a state of “perpetual beta”; “the wisdom of crowds” (O’Reilly, 2005).

These crowds have become our own personal learning networks, our communities. We use blogs and wiki’s and subscribe to feeds. Feeds in themselves change how we interact with the internet; we are having pertinent information given to us. We are no longer searching endlessly for that information. Imagine the potential for students. Have you ever seen an 8^th grade student in a computer lab or library try to perform nettrekker and google searches and come back frustrated as can be. I have. We are removing a piece of frustration and giving back to our students the time they need to digest information instead of having them spend all of their time searching for information. None of this would be possible without web 2.0. And where does that leave us in education, where do we focus when it comes to web 2.0 and professional development, lacking indeed.

Personally having become a web 2.0 user of late, I am amazed at the amount of tools that are out there and the amount of information I have already learned and accumulated via these tools. In eight weeks I have played with at least 10 different tools, and I haven’t even begun to touch the surface. Web 2.0 has allowed me to connect to people all over the world, via my blog, my wiki, my twitter account, and various other bookmarking and networking tools that I have found. I am thrilled to be a part of such a large and growing community.