PLN: Time to start one!

I know what you think....the last think education needs is another acronym. Well, I can't help myself. Okay, you don't have to call it a PLN, you can call it a Personal Learning Network if you like. In its most basic sense a PLN is one's online learning group, tools, and connections. The whole idea is that new learning can happen in other places than a traditional classroom or PD session. One could argue that there is so much new information of value that one can no longer limit that learning to just traditional channels. My main PLN is made up my RSS feeds from blogs I follow. Although I have only tinkered with the technology others might include Twitter and Skype. Skye is online videoconferencing tool. Twitter is a bit harder to explain. It is more or less a microblog. People post by using 140 or fewer characters. So basically you post a line or two about what you are doing. People can follow your posts and you can follow their posts. It allows people to get very quick feedback or information about what might be of interest to them.

Miguel Guhlin posts about the process of building your PLN. But it so much more than just reading the information. It is also about interacting with the information....that means evaluation and synthesizing it, critiquing it and then writing up your own learning based on the new information. ie Blogging about what you learn or figuring out some other way to share it.

I am still tinkering around with the idea of another tech class this spring and if I do PLNs will be a major part of the class.