Personal Learning Networks
Welcome to my blog! This is a place where I will post about different subjects relating to teaching and education. For my first blog post I will be discussing Personal Learning Networks, or PLN's.
Now by this time I'm sure you're wondering what a personal learning network is?
Well, a personal learning network is an organization that consists of all of the people a learner will interact with and acquire all their knowledge from while they are in their environment of learning. In an article titled, learning at your service, C. Bonk defines a personal learning network as an opportunity to build, tinker with, and share information that might be of value to a growing knowledge base, community of practice, or open access digital repository (Bonk, 328).
I decided to bring in a quote from one of my favorite teaching websites because I feel as though it embodies Personal Learning Networks perfectly.
“A Personal Learning Network is a way of describing the group of people that you connect with to learn their ideas, their questions, their reflections, and their references. Your PLN is not limited to online interactions, but it is that online, global interactive part that really makes it special. It is personal because you choose who’s part of that group; you choose if you want to lurk–just check out what people are saying–or if you share; because you choose when to do so, and how to do so.”
-Teach thought staff
So going off of that quote, a personal learning network is similar to the way that people by connecting with other people who share similar interests and goals in life. An interesting point to think about, that I will leave you wondering in this blog post is how personal learning networks will develop and change as technology advances. Will the evolution of technology have a large impact on personal learning networks?
References:
Siemens, G. (2014, March 4). Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age. Retrieved September 9, 2017.
Bonk, C. (2009) The World Is Open. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Images Retrieved From:
https://www.google.com/search?q=personal+learning+network&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi9m8-qjJzWAhUH2WMKHUb3BlUQ_AUICigB&biw=1280&bih=631#imgrc=1XIa7m99fPXdFM:
