Teachers, Students and Teaching in a Digital Age: Personal Learning Network (PLN) (Tech Task #2)

Before the internet, networking and remaining connected with the world looked very different than today. Today, those who have access to the internet, whether it is in their homes, on their phones or one of the many "free" hotspots businesses offer, are constantly connected to some type of network. The networks we interact with are vast and intentionally or not, we learn from those networks.

This blog post will look at Personal Learning Networks (PLN), Personal Learning Environments (PLE), the implications of the digital age for both teachers and students and changes caused by the pandemic. 

What is a Personal Learning Network (PLN)?

Wikipedia defines a PLN as "a learning network that consists of the people a learner interacts with and derives knowledge from in a personal learning environment." The slideshow video (the video has no spoken words) below gives a deeper explanation of PLNs.

PLN's are not a new concept, but rather have been enhanced and expanded by the rapid advancements in technology and the internet. The idea of a PLN aligns very closely with a pedological position called connectivism. In a very basic capacity, connectivism suggests that knowledge is learned as a result of collective connections. In other words, learning is not an individual activity, but rather a group activity. If you'd like to learn more about connectivism, check out this open-source text. Within a connectivism lens, a PLN would be the group that an individual interacts with and within those interactions would be where the learning takes place.

What is a Personal Learning Environment (PLE)?

While a PLN is the network of connections with people, the PLE is the whole environment that includes the tech "tools, communities and services [...] that learners use to direct their own learning."

Below is an example of a PLE as it is the space where connections are formed. The actual interactions with people, regardless if it is active (back and forth dialogue) or passive interactions (reading the content people publish), is the PLN piece. 

Photo credit: Janson Hews

How to build your PLN as a teacher?

Photo sourced from edublogs

The PLN's of today's connected teacher looks a lot different when compared to the PLNs of teachers before the internet. There are many implications of teaching in a digital world. The role of the teacher is different in the digital age. The teacher is no longer the only source of information that students have and textbooks and local sources are no longer the only resources teachers have.

As a teacher, the digital age has brought more complex socio-emotional connections to diffuse and support in the classroom, overwhelming resources, expanded worldview perspectives, global issue awareness, constantly being connected and many more implications. The implications are not all negative, in fact, I view the majority of the implications of the digital age as positive for myself as a teacher.

With all the new information at our disposal and the challenging implications the digital age has brought, it is important for teachers to build a PLN to be able to learn how to approach those implications. So, how do you create your PLN?

The good news is that you likely have already started to build your PLN and didn't even know it. If you are a colleague of mine from the Internet for Educations then you certainly have built a good base of your PLN with your Twitter account, the blog posts and commenting on others blog posts.

Steps to build your PLN

1. Choose what tools you are going to use.

This blog by Connected Principals outlines many tools to build your PLN. Some of the tools include the following:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Instagram
• YouTube
• Social Bookmarking tools such as Diigo
• Blogs
• Podcasts
• RSS Reader (to organize and monitor the blogs you follow)         

2. Considered who you want to connect with. Follow, reach out and get connected with those people.

• Do you want to connect with teachers in your area? From other parts of the world? Who teaches the same grade as you? Who uses a specific tool in their classroom?
• Researchers in your field of interest?
• School divisions?

3. Decide how you want to learn.

• Do you want to learn by directly interacting with your connections or by being a passive consumer? 
• It is important to remember that lurking in the background as a consumer of content is okay for a while but the real learning within your PLN is by contributing back to your network with dialogue in some capacity or by posting your own content. 
• Do you want to learn by Videos? Pictures? Audio? Reading?

4. Choose when you want to learn.

• The digital world has allowed us to learn how we want, where we want and when we want. No matter when you choose to interact with your PLN, the important part is that you set time to continually interact with your PLN.  

It is important to remember that in building your PLN take the time to set it up in a way that benefits your interests and continue to work on it. Your PLN will and it should change as you progress through different seasons of your life.

How to support your students in building their PLN?
In this digital age, students are now coming into the classroom with global connections, more complex socio-emotional dilemmas, possible cyberbullying, overwhelming access to information, the ability to be connected 24-7 and access to exposure to all sorts of content, the good and the bad. Before reaching your middle years' classrooms, many students (grade dependant) have already started to build their PLNs with the use of social media.

An article published by Pew Research Center noted the following

While [teens] say they at times feel overwhelmed by the drama on social media and pressure to construct only positive images of themselves, they simultaneously credit these online platforms with several positive outcomes – including strengthening friendships, exposing them to different viewpoints and helping people their age support causes they care about.

While there are negatives to being connected, I believe it our responsibility to help guide our students in how to build and use their PLN to enhance the positives such as friendships, the different viewpoints and taking action, and diminish the negative impacts. 

I am not exactly sure how to facilitate student PLN support yet but some ideas I have is helping the students reflect on what kind of content they want to read about/learn about in their PLN, talking about the implications of what they post within their PLN, leveraging our own PLN to help students connect with others and supporting them with how to optimize the tools used to create their PLN. 

Here are some other resources to help support our students build and use their PLN: 

• 10 Ways to Help Students Develop their PLN (blog post)
• Creating a Personal Learning Network (blog post) 
• Educator Insights (video)
• Learning Networks Could Reconfigure Schools (video) 

Have our PLNs changed due to the COVID-19 pandemic?

There have been many changes in our lives brought on by the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic; the change in education being a big one. I cannot speak to everyone's experience but I believe that the pandemic has changed both my PLN as a teacher. SOOOO many companies have either made their content available for free or produced new and free supports for teachers, parents and students during the pandemic. In addition to new resources, new connections have been formed with so many people learning how to virtually connect with each other. Personally, the amount of virtual PD available has expanded my PLN in a way that would not have been possible before the pandemic. My PLN has never been so big and I am so excited for all the new learning I will experience as I move forward.