In Search of the Meaning of PLNs

The Education field is full of acronyms that sound intimidating, PLN is one of those. I don't know why, but there is something about three letters without any vowels between them that causes me to get anxious. When I first came across it sometime in the past two weeks, I immediately thought I must have missed something big, where I had been all this time that everyone is now talking about these things? Finding out what the three letters stood for didn't help ease my level of uneasiness. I have been on maternity leave for almost two years now (childcare is not easy to come by in this part of the world) and I was worried there had been some huge developments in the field that I had missed. I felt lost. Turns out a Personal Learning Network is just a fancy term for something we have all probably had since we started teaching or even started thinking about teaching: colleagues, mentors, professors, education publications, professional organizations...

When referring to the digital version of the 21st Century PLN, I find Sue Waters is once again right on with her description, so I'll use her words here...

"Personal Learning Networks (PLNs) are all about using web tools such as blogs, wiki, twitter, facebook to create connects with others which extend our learning, increases our reflection while enabling us to learn together as part of a global community. PLNs increase our opportunities to ask questions and receive help compared to our normal daily face-to-face interactions."

Best of a PLN is it's personal! You make all the choices:

• What tools you use!
• Who you connect with!
• How you want to learn!
• When you want to learn!

Her tips:

1. Start slowly and find mentor(s) to help you.
2. Use the same username across tools
3. Share as much as you take
4. Ask as much as you answer
5. Try new TOOLS before you decide they're not worth the time
6. Comment on other people's blogs
7. Life long learning is the key!"

Another person I am becoming a huge fan of is Jeff Utecht. He has a great blog "The Thinking Stick" and actually tweets (@jutecht) useful stuff most of the time. I enjoyed his Stages of PLN Adoption write up. He has some wise insights, specially the part about finding balance between learning and living. My favorite quotes from the article:

"As you immerse yourself into the network your learning increases, the more you learn, the more you want to learn, the more immerse you become within your network."

"A sense of calm begins as you understand that you can learn when you need to learn and you do not need to know it all know."

So remember if you're feeling overwhelmed by the potential of your PLN and keeping up with it, you're probably not in Stage 5 yet, but just take a step back, put your life into perspective and that warm fuzzy feeling of calmness will soon wash over you. I'm hoping that by the end of this week I'll have reached the end of Stage 2, evaluating and coming up with a plan for my PLN.

But having a PLN isn't only about learning, some people develop very close relationships with it. If you want a dose of how good a PLN can make someone feel, Kim Caise (co-host of Live Classroom 2.0) is full of praise for hers in her post "My PLN is The Best!".