Thing 18 - Building Your Own PLN

In my mind, there is some confusion on exactly what is meant by a Personal Learning Network. The description and weblinks in this assignment would make it appear that a PLN and a social networking group (like interest specific NING) are one and the same. However, I think that a PLN is more than just belonging to (or creating) a networking group. When I heard David Warlick last fall, he talked about setting up a homepage that would serve as a connection to those websites and people that were your experts, mentors, and communities so that all these links were in one place or fed into one location. So, when I have had time, I am working on an iGoogle page and brings together those resources that I want to check in on (both professionally and personally) on a regular basis. In this way, I hope to grow my oun PLN or PLC over time.

I am still very skeptical about the value of social networking groups (like NING) in our work with teachers and for my own professional growth. This past year we were part of a statewide project that used blended learning (live stream from a host site combined with on-site facilitators) to deliver PD. At our site alone, we had close to 90 teachers. For between sessions, these teachers were split into four NING groups. Three of the four groups had paid on-line facilitators (provided by the project). While most of the teachers signed up initially for the groups, there was VERY little participation. Over the course of the year, there were less that ten posts to the four groups combined and most of those were by the faciliatators who were attempting to start discussions!

In going through the list of web resources in this lesson, I chose to explore the MACUL site. I went to the 2010 MACUL conference in Grand Rapids and was impressed with the keynotes that I had heard. I was pleased to see that these presentations are now on Mistream so I can reference them in the future. I also looked through the groups to see if there were discussions going on in the networking groups. I was pleased to discover SIGPL - a group focusing on professional development / learning for teachers and there were 18 members signed up. However, there had been no activity on the social networking site since April 27 and absolutely no discussions / discussion threads. As a result of both of these experiences, I question the willingness of teachers to engage in these kinds of groups on a regular basis. I would want to do a lot more research on what makes these kinds of groups successful and how to motivate teachers to use them before putting in the time required to create and maintain one.