Personal Learning Networks for Educators: 10 Tips - Getting Smart by Guest Author - edchat, EdTech, PLN
By Dr. Mark Wagner I often begin my workshop on personal learning networks (PLN) for educators by asking these questions: Who is in your learning network? Who do you learn from on a regular basis? Who do you turn to for your own professional development? Some educators are lucky enough to learn from their coworkers or colleagues at their site. I usually ask these questions at conferences, which are frequently only annual events – and rare treats for many educators. Learning to Network and Networking to Learn 1. 2. 3. 4. Networking Tools and Anecdotes The four tips above are the core activities of building a personal learning network, and they can be applied using various tools to connect with others online. 5. 6. 7. 8. Final Thoughts These final two tips will help keep your initial frustrations in perspective, and help you avoid the temptation to focus on unimportant metrics as you grow your network. 9. 10. Note: I’ve also been writing about this topic for some time.
Co-Learning
Howard Rheingold: "I never call the people who sign up for the courses I offer online "students." We are all "co-learners." The terminology both acknowledges and inspires the kind of collaborative learning that turns a reading group into something much more exciting. In both formal, face-to-face, educational institutions and experimental online groups, I work from the first moments to persuade people that it's possible for all of us to learn together as a community in a more deeply satisfying and useful way than if students take responsibility only for their own learning. The success of the situations I'm describing depends on the efforts of a core group of enthusiastic self-learners - or at least a majority of the group who are willing to try an alternative to the kind of schooling they are accustomed to. "The Magic of Co-Learnerhood Why not?
3 Steps for Building a Professional Learning Network - Education Week Teacher
Published Online: December 31, 2014 —Photo by Sean Chaffey, via Flickr Creative Commons By Brianna Crowley Recently, a colleague asked me, “What is a PLN?” She was taking a graduate course on technology implementation and was required to form a “PLN” using digital communities and tools. Her question prompted me to articulate how I define a professional learning network (PLN) and how I have shaped my own. A professional learning network is a vibrant, ever-changing group of connections to which teachers go to both share and learn. Teachers build PLNs the same way they build any network: by investing time to find and connect with people they trust, who have shared interests and passions. Although technology is often the vehicle to build connections, a PLN is about relationships. Let’s explore how to develop each of these layers of relationships and understand their role in professional learning. Step One: Find the Professionals Imagine you were moving to a new city. Feeling Overwhelmed? Web Only
The future of loneliness | Olivia Laing | Society
At the end of last winter, a gigantic billboard advertising Android, Google’s operating system, appeared over Times Square in New York. In a lower-case sans serif font – corporate code for friendly – it declared: “be together. not the same.” This erratically punctuated mantra sums up the web’s most magical proposition – its existence as a space in which no one need ever suffer the pang of loneliness, in which friendship, sex and love are never more than a click away, and difference is a source of glamour, not of shame. As with the city itself, the promise of the internet is contact. It seems to offer an antidote to loneliness, trumping even the most utopian urban environment by enabling strangers to develop relationships along shared lines of interest, no matter how shy or isolated they might be in their own physical lives. But proximity, as city dwellers know, does not necessarily mean intimacy. Loneliness centres on the act of being seen. But there are other dangers.
Cooperation
I see a new story emerging about how humans get things done together. The outlines of this new narrative can be seen in recent evidence that contradicts old assumptions about human selfishness versus altruism, self-interest versus collective action. What could be more important than understanding how people cooperate and fail to cooperate? Toward a Literacy of Cooperation Syllabus I teach this course once or twice a year online via Rheingold U. Cooperation Commons Together with Andrea Saveri and Kathi Vian of the Institute for the Future, I compiled resources toward the goal of catalyzing and interdisciplinary study of cooperation. Cooperation Commons research summaries (March, 2005) Technologies of Cooperation report (January, 2005) “Emerging digital technologies present new opportunities for developing complex cooperative strategies that change the way people work together to solve problems and generate wealth. “How do you do business with an illusive network that belongs to nobody?
