Is it terrible that I haven’t created a personal or professional learning network throughout this course yet? I mean, I’ve certainly started to. I use Diigo on a daily basis now--but I don’t share my notes with anyone. I blog about educational videos and articles and read others’ blogs--but that’s mostly within the confines of this class. I find some of my friends’ links posted on Facebook interesting and useful (how I found out extra details and opinions about the riots in London and the Fukushima earthquake & tsunami), but I ignore most of them (couldn’t care less about the score from the latest Jets game or another anti-Obama news article).
As I get more and more comfortable with the different web tools, I think the next step, then, is to start including the right kinds of people in my PLN. Up until now, I’ve limited myself to social networking (Facebook, for example) for purely personal purposes. I see pictures of my friends’ babies, get invitations to parties, share comments about the quirks of day-to-day life via status updates. If I were to broaden my network to include people also interested in using web tools as learning forums, then its potential as a PLN would expand indefinitely.
There are a few reasons, I think, why I haven’t yet done this. First of all, I have always appreciated a compartmentalized lifestyle, meaning that I like to keep the different groups of people in my life (social circle vs. work colleagues, family vs. friends) unofficially segregated from each other. I feel like it keeps my life organized and uncomplicated, with clearly defined boundaries of what belongs where. This makes me think of one of Dan’s past blog entries about Google+. If I’m going to build a professional learning network, I like the idea that I can keep it separately from my personal networking. Secondly, I’ve been automatically involved in a PLN in some way for the past year through my PSU classes. Moodle discussion forums might be more limited than global bookmarking or microblogging sites; however, ideas and resources are still being shared and questions are still being asked and answered. I think once I complete my degree and exit the academic community, I will be more likely to use more conventional sites and web tools in order to maintain my PLN and keep myself informed.
No, not a problem that you have not created a PLN through the class. I completely understand your reasoning, and eventually once you are teaching, I hope you will rely on some of the resources you have started to collect. The way I like to look at my PLN is through the blogs that I have captured in my google reader, my twitter account that I hardly use, the linkedin account I created, but never have time to read all of the posts, my facebook account and the numerous websites that I signed up for their automatic posts that come directly to my already overfilled email account. I do feel that I help to contribute at times when I update my diigo account and then share that resource with one of the groups I belong to. Mostly though, I have been doing this Web2.0 thing for almost 4 years, and I do not constantly communicate with people that I have followed or met through the internet. It starts small. Usually I feel like I have accomplished something if I share it with my PSU students or my colleagues at work. So, no worries. It may or may not work for you and that is fine!
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