Warlick's CoLearners

The Art & Technique of
Personal Learning Networks
or
"A Gardener's Approach to Learning"

Introduction:

Diagram from Growing Your Personal Learning Network 1
As we work in a time of rapid change, with students who are digital natives, from within a dramatically new information landscape, the best description of the 21st Century teacher is Master Learner. Participants in this presentation will learn how to utilize a variety of new web-based applications to construct and cultivate personal learning networks. Educators will learn to attract information from other professional educators, experts in the fields of study, current news and news searches, student perspective, relevant resources from a growing library of web-based digital content, and other content sources to assist them in adapting to this age of change.
In a way, what we're talking about is a gardener's approach to learning, where you are working, rather than a small ecosystem in your back yard, we are working an information ecosystem, learning how its elements interrelate and arranging new relations to create an environment, a network, that produces what we need to know to do what we need to do. You can read more about this approact in 2¢s; worth [link].

Web Links

Nothing New

There is nothing new about personal learning networks. They are the people and information sources that help you accomplish your goals, either on the job or in your personal pursuits. They are the teachers who work in your school, your instructional supervisor, your library media specialist, the art teacher at the high school, which whom you are friends, the magazines you subscribe to, books you brought home from college, etc.
Today, however, new techniques for organizing digital networked information, have enabled us to fashion new kinds of networks that extend far beyond our immediate location and face-to-face connections, and to grow our networks based not on explicit decisions, but through the ideas of other nodes (people and resources), whose ideas intersect with ours.

Origins of the Concept

In March (2009), Darcey Moore posted this article about the origins of the term Personal Learning Networks, which seems to have drived from Personal Learning Evironments. He links to blog entries by myself, George Seimens, and Stephen Downes (such up-rising company). Here is the opening.
Last year I started asking around, on Twitter, for the origin of the acronyms that I was reading so much about. �Personal Learning Networks� (PLNs) and �Personal Learning Environments� (PLEs) were so often used by the educators that I was following that it was surprising no-one really could source them.

Read More

Aspects of PLN Planned for this Presentation or Workshop

I have recently revised this section, reducing the aspects to three elements. You can see the original aspects list here.
  1. Conversation Connectors -- These are avenues (or tools) that connect us to the people and sources that help us do our jobs. They can include:
    • blogs
    • wikis
    • Microblogging
    • Social Networks (Facebook, Elgg, Nings)
    • Virtual Worlds
  2. Mining the Conversation -- These are strategies and tools for searching the blogosphere and twittervers, and other realms of fluid conversation, looking for content and especially for people and sources that we can connect to for more constant info. The tools are numerous, but chief among them are:
    • Technorati & Google Blog Search for searching the blogosphere
    • Twitter Search for searching the twitterverse
    • Delicious, a social bookmarking service can also be searched
    • YouTube, Flickr, and other social media sites can be searched
    • Even News Searches
    1. Another part of "Mining the Conversation" is the ability to make "sticky" the content and people we identify. Using RSS, we can connect to those people and sources in a way that they ideas continue to flow to us.
  3. Mapping the Conversation -- much is this is eye candy, but it is increasingly important that as the networks grow, and especially as the content grows, we will need new ways of viewing all of the information. Data visualization, one of the most fascinating aspects of the digital realm today, provides us with useful and interesting ways to see our information landscape.

For more information on these aspects, refer to the Concept Map

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1 Warlick, David. "Growing Your Personal Learning Network." Leading & Learning with Technology March-April 2009: 12-16. Print. ⇑

Gundosluv? — 30 November 2009, 09:46

Aloha! uou

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