Earlier this year, my stepdaughter underwent open heart surgery. The procedure went smoothly (thank goodness!) and she recovered well, however during this time, I was a little scattered, and found it difficult to fit in concentrated blocks of time writing my thesis. Even when I did have an hour or two to spare, my brain […]
Tag: PLNs
Networked Learning Conference presentation: Transforming professional learning through Personal Learning Networks
It has been a long held ambition to attend and participate in the biennial Networked Learning conference. Modelling the open, networked learning practices they research, the conference publishes the papers on their website, and I have used many of them in my thesis research. This year the conference is being held in Zagreb, Croatia, and […]
PLNs: Theory and Practice
As many of you will know, my PhD research is exploring the concept of PLNs and networked and connected learning, by investigating how teachers experience professional learning through their own PLNs. This post is based upon my research, and was created in part because I was asked by the lovely Dr Mandy Lupton to prepare a […]
Understanding Affordances Part Two
The wonderful thing about sharing your learning openly on a blog is that people comment on your posts and contribute to your learning. Yesterday, shortly after I published the first post in this series, the post was commented on by Jenny Mackness, a scholar whose work I very much admire. She shared with me two […]
Making Your Practice Public: the special sauce of professional learning!
During my studies, I have been reading a lot of research about what makes professional learning effective. Professional learning is something that governments, education systems and schools invest a lot of money in, and so as you can imagine, there is quite a lot of research about what ‘works’ and what doesn’t. In fact, there […]


