Personal Learning Network and me

This blog post is part of the series on a course called Open Networked Learning, specifically for the course offered in Autumn of 2018, abbreviated as ONL181. This blog post is about my reflections on topic three of the course that deals with Learning in communities. I will cover some interesting things I learned about Personal Learning Network (PLN). Please note PLN’s, in general, are used by many different professionals, however, this blog post is specifically talking about PLN’s for teachers.

What is a Personal Learning Network

Every time I hear a new word or phrase used in pedagogical development (in the context of this course), I like to dig a little to find its origin. Finding the roots of PLN was a little difficult. After a few google scholar searches and seeing what was the most common citation used, I came across many (according to google scholar, 30+ citations) reference to an article by Daniel Tobin in 1998. I did not find the original article, but here is an article on his LinkedIn page that talks about it. Now that I have some understanding about its origins, let’s dig into what it means. Kay Oddone in her 2 part videos (part 1 and part 2) about PLN defines what it means, she also shares views about what other teachers think what their understanding of PLN is. These views are very interesting and in line with my own understanding of PLN’s. There is no fixed definition, it just that it consists of three main parts, below I summarize what I learned:

• Personal — It is personal, no one tells you what to do, no one invites you, you get to decide if you want to be in a network (or form one, most PLN’s are formed), you decide who you want to have in your network, you decide if you want to just learn or also share (sharing is highly encouraged). Your team members don’t need to know (they can if you choose to tell them explicitly) they are part of your PLN. You may not know members of the PLN personally and the network can consist of other things apart from people, such as resources, learning platforms, and organizations.
• Learning — It is all about learning, you usually have one PLN, but different parts, one part of the network is to help with education and another part for help with research (I am both a researcher and a teacher) and there can be another part for technology, I am a tech enthusiast too.
• Network — It is like a tree branch, all the members of your PLN are connected to others, Twitter is a wonderful example and most used social software for building a PLN. Note that PLN was coined when the internet was still a baby. So, digital connectivity is not essential, but today it is the digital connectivity that influences the successes of a PLN the most. This is where collaboration and cooperation tools (social software) come into the picture.

What can PLN do and should you have one?

A few decades ago, we used to talk about having the right to access educational content, today we talk about having access to an educational platform. Educational content is available today, but how to consume it, which one to consume, where to consume? It’s not about who will give me the content, it is about who can direct me to the best content. This is where PLN comes to picture, you have access to a curated list of content. PLN will help with dealing with the overwhelming amount of content that is there to consume today. This is just one of the many advantages. There are pitfalls too in a PLN, such as stale or old information. This especially applies when sharing information, the information you share can become stale and keeping a track of this and keeping it updated as is a challenge.

Building blocks of a PLN

There are many things involved in a PLN, few of these building blocks are

• Social networks — Twitter, Facebook, etc
• Social software (tools that enable more than 1 person to communicate and collaborate) — Google docs, office 365, Google+ (it is interesting how I mention Google+ here and not in social networks, I will leave this hanging so that you the reader can ponder over), etc
• Sharing tools — Blogs, youtube, etc (the biggest challenge is keeping your blogs and resources updated)

One thing that is common in all the points above is the use of the internet and the computing device. It was in 1995 that the role and impact of the use of computers and the internet in learning networks (interestingly there was no mention on personal learning network then) were presented in a well-cited book ”Learning Networks — A Field Guide to Teaching and Learning Online”.

Do I have a PLN?

I did not know I had one, but after my understanding of PLN, I realize I do have one. It consists of people, learning platforms, organizations, and collaborative tools. I have very specific people whose resources I use for a specific topic. For a given topic, I learn mostly from 1 or 2 people and/or resources in my network, which means my list of resources is already curated and I know where to go. Very rarely I add a new resource to the network for an existing topic, 99% of the time this is because of recommendation from the current network.

How does my PLN look like?

Figure below shows how my network looks like, what tools I use, how I communicate, where I learn and who I learn from. I must confess, I am still very much a passive member in my PLN, meaning to say I consume content, rarely create content.

That was a very brief post about the Personal Learning Network of mine.