Blog #4 -21st Century Skills & Lifelong Learning

Personal Learning Networks

There is a great push about these Personal Learning Networks. We can build an online network of people interested in a subject or range of subjects. We can then build a community discussion about these subjects in our online environments. That community can help itself learn new information and create new ideas or solutions. It is a community of learners.

It sounds magical until you realize that it is just talking about placing online what good teachers have been doing in their classrooms for decades. Promoting good discussions, engaging the class with new ideas, creating solutions and building a community are all things I have seen in my classrooms both as a student and a teacher. So what problem are these Personal Learning Networks trying to solve.

Well if your field of study is small so that large distances separate the people interested, then using the Internet to connect virtually is an excellent solution. It also allows people to connect that do not have a similar time schedule. Since you can read and post at any time it means that anyone can do it even if they could not meet people at a specific time. So PLNs can help connect people across space and time but if you can be in the same place at the same time would your discourse be any less valid then if we were in a PLN? I am sure there are people who will argue about text and its longevity or its ability to promote critical thinking but I have to admit I think it is also because they are people who learn and think well in the written word.

For those of use who are slow readers and pained writers these PLNs seem like the most horrid beast from the underworld. Remove the lectures and interaction with the teacher? Force us to read through page after page of loosely related material in order to find the few gems of new concepts in our PLNs? The idea frankly scares me and makes me think that if that was how education had been growing up for me I would probably have dropped out of school.

http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/connectivism/?p=61

http://kwhobbes.wordpress.com/2009/02/17/professionalpersonal-learning-networks/