When you speak with teachers who maintain a Personal Learning Network (PLN) for professional learning, most of them wonder how they ever lived without it. Being able to tap into the global ‘hive mind’ to seek inspiration, new pedagogical approaches, feedback and collegial support is pretty awesome. Prior to the development of digital social networks, […]
Tag: professional learning network
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 […]
Naming and Taming your Network
Happy New Year! Time goes by so quickly, and it is difficult to believe that this new blog of mine is now a year old! I began this blog with the idea that I would use it to capture my reflections and learning while researching, as I commenced an Education Doctorate full time. A year on, […]
Collaborative Learning and Learning Communities
Learning is social Much of what I have been reading and reflecting on has been shaped by my belief that quite a lot of learning is social. I don’t mean social in the sense of going to a bar with friends and having a drink; I mean social as in constructed with others. While a […]
Informal Learning
Learning everyday In a rapidly changing world, it seems like we are learning all of the time. We are constantly bombarded with technologies which require us to learn new ways to communicate, new ways to work and even to new ways to learn. Using the internet to learn has for many of us become second […]
Digital Me: My Identity Online for ONL161
Digital Me! As part of my participation in Open Network Learning 161 MOOC, I am pausing to reflect on who I am online. This is quite serendipitous, because I am also working part time as a sessional academic for the subject ‘Social Technologies’ in the Bachelor of Information Technology at Queensland University of Technology, and […]
Understanding Connected Learning – Part One
We have moved from the information age, to the connected age, says President and CEO of Educause, Diana Oblinger (2013). The connected age is enabled by technology that is designed for user contribution – the systems which allow for “the architecture of participation“(O’Reilly, 2004). In the connected age, where information resides is not important; it […]
PLE or PLN or LMS or OLN?
So many acronyms! Before I begin: PLE = Personal Learning Environment PLN = Personal / Professional Learning Network LMS = Learning Management System OLN= Open Learning Network What these all mean is the subject of some debate, but my (current) interpretations of these terms will become clear in the blog post below! This post was […]
My PLN in action – real life examples of informal Professional Learning
So I’ve spent the past 2 weeks reading research papers, articles on professional learning for teachers and professional/personal learning networks and books by David Weinberger and George Siemens. I still feel as though I have only scratched the surface when it comes to understanding the academic side of social media being used as a source of […]