I’ve been going through your blogs and am so please to find that many of you are well on your way to developing a global personal learning network (PLN). Not only are you posting powerful comments on blogs from all over the world, but many of you have entered into conversations with those bloggers – they have responded to your comments.
Creating a learning environment that pushes students to connect with like-minded and different-minded folks is major objective for all of my classes – and for me! For those unfamiliar with the blogging activity I use, here it is:
- locate a post (by an educator, someone in the field, or someone interested in the field) that sparks your interest
- formulate a response and post it to that blogger’s blog
- bring the rest of the class (and the instructor) into the conversation – in the 21Classes blog provide the Blog title, post title, URL to the post and the comment; provide a quote from the author; copy and paste the comment
- check back to see if the blogger has responded to the comment
Let the PLN begin ….
What is a PLN?
Remember summer camp? The friends you made and how you wrote back and forth? Some of us went back several summers and hooked back up with our camp friends. Well, think of the web-enhanced PLN as a continuation of summer camp … without the campfire smoke. Our networks are made up of people and we use different tools to establish and maintain those connections. Twitter, Delicious, and Diigo (which I talked about a couple of weeks ago) – also Skype (which we’re using in class) – enable us to develop and sustain our global PLNs. There are more, too many to mention. So here are some PLN posts from the blogsphere that address some:
Jeff Utecht – very interesting diagram
So, go to the next level of professional development – create your PLN and enjoy the ride.
Cycling Around Ed Tech 