PLN

I think I first heard the term PLN in September when I was introduced to Plurk.  I heard educator and motivational speaker Kevin Honeycutt discuss his experience with networks of learners. He claimed that he wasn’t the smartest person on the planet, but by developing a network of smart people, he had 24-7 access to information he would otherwise be unaware of…that is the short version of his story anyway.  His explanation of a learning network didn’t really come apparent to me until I began exploring PLNs through this course.  Through this course I got the feel for the fact that we can function as a collective brain. I have my own ideas and way of looking at the world. Which, for me, means that I will participate in web searches using the same old key words and phrases as always. That means I will come up with similar results. But someone who thinks even slightly different than I do will come up with different results. Together we make a great team. Each of us is able to give something to the other person in our PLN and gain new  a new resource in return.  Delicious is one of those perfect examples of this taking place in real life.

Now, I can’t say that I fully fell in love with Delicious, but I certainly do see the potential for it for classroom use. If students in the same class all ban together and share their bookmarks with others, they can read a plethora of web pages that they may not have found otherwise (or would have taken hours to do so). Delicious also allows people to organize and tag things for easy access, which makes finding information quickly an easy feat.

The other thing I loved was the RSS feed. I thoroughly enjoyed the Google Reader. When  we began our blogs as a class, I was pretty scared that I was going to have to try and find each classmate every time I wanted to read a blog post, but (thank goodness) the RSS feed made it so that all recent posts of my fellow classmates were right there. The idea that any blog I subscribe to will automatically appear in my Google Reader, made me feel like I could manage this class (and any information) with ease.

The other tools I thought were interesting were Second life and Facebook. Previously I thought of these tools for social networking, but I can see the potential for both to be used as Learning Networks.  If I was really interested in the environment of Second Life, I could use the tool to set up my own virtual classroom. Students would have a more interactive learning environment than the D2L and other course management systems (CMSs).  Perhaps one could develop both socially and academically in a place like Second life, where Moodle and D2L provide more of a formal atmosphere.

Also, the idea of using Facebook as a learning network is attractive. Many of us already use it as a social network, so the familiar format would make creating a learning environment extremely simple. I also like how Facebook allows you to write messages longer than 140 characters. People could even reflect on activities and share resources there if they liked and respond to each other publicly or privately, which is very nice.

Outside of this class my personal learning network will include Diigo, Google Tools, Blogger, and, surprisingly, twitter. I spent a lot of time disliking twitter, but after I found a few people to follow that I actually enjoyed following, I decided it was a neat little tool. One I won’t be using to let the world in on what I’m doing at Menards, but one I will use to see what Margaret Atwood and Grammar Girl are up to. I might even consider using it to quiz kids on vocabulary, or remind kids of upcoming vocab tests. Just yesterday one of my students actually found me on Twitter without me telling him I was even on it. This it just goes to show that kids are using these technology and they are on the lookout for their teachers on those technologies.

Since our school already has Gmail as its main e-mail, I think that I would use Google docs to build a net work with desired co-workers. I have already discussed putting all of my handouts and worksheets for each of my classes on Google docs with one of the special education teachers. Just by making my resources available, it would make her life easier because she could get extra copies of my worksheets from me without me having to look for them, and e-mail them or print them off. Also, the kids could hand them in to me via Google Docs.