CoLearners

Scanning through the schedule and the conference web site reveals a new type of learning experience. Many of the sessions are aimed toward harnessing a new information landscape for both classroom and professional learning. The site announced a wireless environment, urges attendees to bring their own laptops (BYOL), and even includes a conference tag (edtechconf) for bloggers and conference photographers, information artifacts being aggregated at both the conference photo stream and Hitchhikr.

It is unique and logical that there are only a limited number of distinct presentations that will be offered numerous times. I will be presenting about Personal Learning Networks, which links in with a number of other presentations, including Will Richardson’s Connecting Ideas and Knowledge, Alan Tamayose’s Introduction to Web 2.0, Liz Castillo and Renee Teraoka’s iCan Café, and Mark Hines’ Emerging Issues in Online, Immersive Experiences...

My contribution will re-introduce many of the topics above, but within the context of personal and professional learning. Personal Learning Networks, or PLNs, are not new. We’ve always had people and relied upon information resources that helped us do our jobs. However, our times of rapid change have made our PLN a more important tool, worthy of more explicit cultivation, and the emerging collaborative information landscape have given us new and dynamic avenues to learn from others.

One concept that I will not be sharing in the presentation are type or levels of PLN avenue. They are:

• Personally maintained synchronous connects — meetings, chance conversations, workshops, telephone conversations, skype, ichat, SecondLife.
• Personally & socially maintained semi-synchronous connectsions — Stephen Heppell calls this nearly now. It includes voice mail, twitter, aspects of blogging and wikis, mailing lists, aspects of social networks.
• Dynamically maintained asynchronous connections — This mostly falls under the domain of RSS aggregators (see Will Richardson’s presentation).
• Network Mining — Tools that enable us to drill into the network and find information and knowledge that, although it was not directed to us or to our community, it is there for the access.

I will also be deliver one of the keynote addresses, Our Students • Our Worlds. This is a big picture presentation that seeks to factor all of the pressures that are applying themselves on our schools and on ourselves as educators, into three bullet points — three disruptive and empowering converging conditions that give a new frames of references for preparing our children for their future. Look for info about the future, students, as a new species of learning, and an emerging new information landscape. It’s a fun presentation.

Aloha, a hui hou!

This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.