I used to walk around talking about my PLN this and that until I realized that many people don’t know what a PLN is:
David Warlick's Working Definition of PLN
I don’t usually quote David Warlick’s definition in conversation although it was one of the first definitions that I saw of PLN, and it provided a framework for my thinking. I usually say something like “MY PLN are the people, systems and tools that I learn from and learn with. Sometimes, they provide quick assistance to help me complete a task. At other times, they engage and challenge my thinking, share resources that they find useful, engage in conversation with me, stretch my intelligence, push me forward, pull me up, help me up. I aim to do the same for them. They’re people that I’ve met, people I have yet to meet and people that I may never meet in the physical world, yet they impact my (lifelong) learning and my teaching in ways that I didn’t use to be able to imagine. They’ve opened up my world.
I know what they do and how they affect me. I hope that I affect them sometimes (reciprocity is necessary for a community to truly thrive). Yet I’m hard pressed to precisely define who they are. I’ve read many articles on creating a professional learning network. I blog, twit, participate in google groups, nings, wikispaces, elluminate sessions and diigo groups, aggregate my feeds, listen to podcasts, etc. So who’s in my PLN? Is it the people that I follow, the people who follow me or the people who I follow who follow me?
I don’t think that it’s any one of those three. I’ve responded to people who don’t follow me and they may have learned from it. People who I don’t follow have responded to my posts on various platforms and I’ve learned from them. The nature of social media makes the network and the learning messy, and my PLN is more dynamic than any real life networks that I’ve ever been part of.
How do you define who’s in your PLN?
I am grappling with this very question. I hope to do a long post on it at some point. I agree it is not so easily defined. In fact some people who do not have a PLN find the concept offensive, suggesting some sort of elitism. I am new to this discussion. But I would like to believe that my PLN includes those I play with and respect, as well as those who may be listening to my conversation. I want a PLN.
I like that you are asking such a question. That makes you a part of my PLN.
Thank you for your comment, Steve. I’m new to the twitter realm but I’ve learned lots from listservs and newsgroups, discussion lists and other virtual communities. I still use many of those but I find that with twitter, I make more meaningful/enduring connections in the virtual world than I ever did before.
I think you hit the nail on the head with your description of learning and a PLN as ‘messy’ That’s the whole value in an online PLN, isn’t it? A ‘live’ PLN has to be people you know and see. An online one can be diverse and dynamic and changing. It can be different every day. You might have a core group of people who you get to know and interact with regularly, but there can be new people, new ideas, new resources, new opinions, new conversation every day!