While Personal Learning Networks (PLNs) may be a relatively newly coined term, David Warlick argues in his article, "Grow Your Personal Learning Network," that PLNs have been around in some form for a long time. We have long been connecting with our loved ones, colleagues, and acquaintances through various forms of information transmission (printed material, television and radio, and more recently, digital media). But recently the speed, efficiency, comprehensiveness, accessibility and possible control with which we can communicate and inform ourselves has been increasing at a dizzying rate, especially through emerging Internet technologies. This expansion and shift in information and communication technologies (ICT) provides unprecedented opportunities and challenges for educators, who are tasked not only with keeping up with modern exponential knowledge growth, but with preparing students' minds for both the content- and the format-change acceleration of the world's future knowledge base. Warlick demonstrates that there are many different types of PLNs, each with its own configuration and input-output methodologies. He puts these ICT connections into three main categories.
There are personally maintained synchronous connections that help people ask and answer questions and solve problems in real-time. With texting, IM, teleconferencing (iChat, Skype and Ustream), Twitter, and Virtual Reality worlds (e.g. Second Life), we can transcend geography, language and culture from and to anywhere in the world. In addition, there are numerous advantages to these new ICTs; for instance, teachers can talk or text-chat with their students and their parents from any computer using these applications, without revealing their private home or cell phone numbers.
Through personally and socially maintained semisynchronous connections, we can communicate nearly in real-time--when it suits our schedule and without having to wait for everyone to be available at a particular time. Then we can be efficiently collaborating with numerous people or entities via distinct info-streams practically simultaneously. Through such media as Twitter, mailing lists, wikis, group discussion boards/forums, Google Docs, Facebook Wall, Ticker, and Like interaction, texting, and Syndicaster, users can multitask and multiply their connecting without having to play an Internet version of "telephone tag."
These two types help us connect with others and with current sources. Through dynamically maintained asynchronous connections, we can granularly tailor the type, amount, sources, and format of the information we choose to expose ourselves to, letting technology do the hard search-work we used to have to do ourselves. RSS aggregators "train relevant content to come to you so you don’t have to go looking for it." Warlick mentioned Google Reader, Netvibes, and Pageflakes as among the more popular of these services. He also explained how we can strategically use tags to leverage Flickr, YouTube, TeacherTube, Google News, and podcasts so as to conform to our learning and professional needs.
Through PLNs we open up a whole new world of technology--sometimes so big a world, it can be daunting. (Indeed, as I was exposing myself to many of these new avenues of connectedness, I became afraid that I would get sucked into any number of "time-black-holes.") So Warlick makes several very useful suggestions for "creating, cultivating, and pruning" our PLNs so they do not inundate us and take away from the time we should be spending doing other things in life. He reassures us that 15 minutes a day is sufficient to learn something new. We should not have too many blogs at first. We need to learn how to organize our folders and the corresponding information we receive into categories. And he admonishes us that we need not read all the blogs, feeds, and text that come to us; we should learn, for instance, to just browse through the headings to see what is important. That will make us better educators, since today's effective digital scholar needs to have one other particular set of skills. That is, it is becoming increasingly important not only to know how and where to trawl for knowledge, but to be able to quickly scan, filter, sort, and fish through the exponeniating sea of electronically retrievable data to snatch just the relevant information that we need. Thus we will be in a position to teach our students "how to fish."
Lastly we need to cultivate our network by connecting to the world that we are learning about. This means we need to be learners and contributors ourselves. To help us do this, we need access to new technologies and applications that will help shape our network of learning. We can take many pathways to becoming better learners. But we need to embrace the change!
No comments:
Post a Comment