CETIL – Certificate of Educational Technology and Information Literacy
Blogging Assignment #1: Thoughts on Personal Learning Networks (January 31)
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Here we go again…
We’ve launched a new initiative at my school, and today’s the first “Face-to-face meeting of the 50 or so participants who are here either to;
- Reaffirm beliefs about “21st Century Literacy” and learning, and possibly to find educational “soul-mates” to share the excitement and try new ideas, or;
- Learn what all the buzz about and come to their own conclusions about the applicability to their own teaching/learning environment, or;
- Mesh current thinking and practice with new ideas, and hopefully come out the other side with a new set of skills that will buttress, rather than replace the skillset they already have as teachers, mentors, guides, and fellow learners
I hope that I fall in the last category. I believe that in over 30 years in education, I’ve learned some core skills that are still relevant and applicable in today’s world. At the same time, as a self-professed “lifelong Learner”, I need to be constantly open to new opportunities to hone my skills and learn new ones. The “Personal Learning Network” is one of those.
I’ve always had a Personal Learning Network. In the 70’s, when I started out as a classroom teacher, it consisted mainly of the teacher down the hall, who mentored me in my first year, guided my early efforts to expand my learning horizons, and collaborated with me on my first Curriculum Development Project (for which we won a regional Pro-D initiative award). Later on, when I became librarian-certified, my PLN expanded to include members of my provincial Specialists’ Associaton (School Libraries). When I moved overseas, my PLN expanded again to include the librarians in the Southeast Asia Region, contacts in the American Association of School Librarians, and a succession of emerging electronic communication systems. Email has had the best “legs”, with my address book still containing live addresses for colleages I’ve been in touch with for, in some cases, up to 20 years. Building on that, a group of us launched “SILCAsia” in 2000 to help connect librarians from many more schools throughout the region. With SILCAsia, we developed a ListServe to help people keep in touch, and to bounce ideas off each other. At the same time, I subscribed to a succession of listservs,
And now we’ve got the Web2.0 tools to help broaden our PLN to a worldwide audience. In the past year, I’ve added the following to my PLN Toolbox. Some of these tools are “generic” education and 21st-Century Learning tools, some are specifically related to libraries and Information Technology, and some are specifically related to Writing, which is a developing personal interest which ties in many ways back to my work as an educator and Teacher-Librarian.
- ABNA – the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest (1&2). After getting an entry into the first contest (Dec/07), there’s a Discussion Board where contestants can share writing stories, commiserate about the difficulties in getting noticed/published, and other topics near and dear to closet scribblers’ hearts.
- Authonomy – a community of unpublished writers who post excerpts to work (usually in the final stages of editing) and solicit feedback from members. By either “Watchlisting” or “Shelving” a title, readers evaluate works. Each week, the 5 top-rated books are reviewed by Harper Collins editors, and some of these receive publishing contracts. The critical review aspect of this site makes it a great learning tool for an aspiring writer
- Delicious.com – I’m new to delicious, and just beginning to tag sites for my students, but have already used it for several assigments. The social tagging aspect of sites like this make them powerful and relevant to students’ changing interests.
- Facebook – my Facebook account has languished as other demands on time intervened, but in our last IBO Extended Essay workshop, we piloted the concept of linking school resources through RSSfeeds directly from Facebook, which kids almost all use. This adoption of the tools that kids already use for social reasons is an area for
- Google Reader – My RSS feeds from Google Reader now include feeds from a wider variety of sources than other before, including feeds on the environment, on writing and on 21st Century Learning in addition to the things I’ve been following (mostly educational journals) for a couple of years now. I need to reorganize my setup soon to account for this new volume of material.
- Shelfari - a Library organizational tool billed as “a social network for people who love books” Discussions around titles, genres or literature themes are a great learning tool.
- Twitter – On Twitter, I’m “rubisr”. I’m only following 25 people so far, and have even fewer followers. I was initially unconvinced by peoples “Tweets” about bathroom breaks, weather, and such, but recently I’ve begun to find a community of people who are Tweeting things that are really useful to me. It’s a gradual filtering operation that I’m beginning to appreciate.
Which brings me back to the cartoon at the top of this post. Web2.0 is great – SO great, in fact, that it risks drowning us in data, opinions and just social “chat”. The questions this all begs are,
- Where’s it all going to end? (what’s coming down the pike next year? Next month? Next WEEK?)
- How will I find tme to keep up with all these new threads in my personal and professional life?
- How can I most efficiently filter out from all this new background “noise”, to find those nuggets that are worth passing on to the students, teachers and parents who may be influenced by my work as a school Teacher-Librarian?
