Session+9

Session 9

Professional/Personal Learning Networks

What are they? Allow you to connect, collaborate and contribute with other professionals in your field. Stages of PLN Adoption

Taken from Jeff Utecht's April 3, 2008 post, "[|Stages of PLN Adoption]."

**Stage 1 Immersion:** Immerse yourself into networks. Create any and all networks you can find where there are people and ideas to connect to. Collaboration and connections take off. **Stage 2 Evaluation:** Evaluate your networks and start to focus in on which networks you really want to focus your time on. You begin feeling a sense of urgency and try to figure out a way to “Know it all.” **Stage 3 Know it all:** Find that you are spending many hours trying to learn everything you can. Realize there is much you do not know and feel like you can’t disconnect. This usually comes with spending every waking minutes trying to be connected to the point that you give up sleep and contact with others around you to be connected to your networks of knowledge. **Stage 4 Perspective:** Start to put your life into perspective. Usually comes when you are forced to leave the network for awhile and spend time with family and friends who are not connected (a vacation to a hotel that does not offer a wireless connection, or visiting friends or family who do not have an Internet connection).
 * //Stage 5 Balance://** //Try and find that balance between learning and living. Understanding that you can not know it all, and begin to understand that you can rely on your network to learn and store knowledge for you. A sense of calm begins as you understand that you can learn when you need to learn and you do not need to know it all right now.//

media type="custom" key="2895995" Tools for Developing Your PLN Microblogs - form of multimedia blogging that allows users to send brief text updates (say, 140 characters or fewer) or micromedia such as photos or audio clips and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user. These messages can be submitted by a variety of means, including text messaging, instant messaging, e-mail, MP3 or the web. (source: [|Wikipedia])

Social Bookmarking - method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata. (source: [|Wikipedia])

Video - video sharing sites and streaming video sites.

Collaborative Documents - allow users to share documents and work on them together.

Concept Mapping - collaborative sites to plan and create ideas.

Publishing - sites to upload presentations and documents to in order to share.

Image Sharing - sites that allow you to upload images for use by others.

Book Clubs/Book Shelves - places to share what you are reading with others and discuss.

Web Conferences - used to conduct live meetings or presentations via the Internet. In a web conference, each participant sits at his or her own computer and is connected to other participants via the internet. This can be either a downloaded application on each of the attendees computers or a web-based application where the attendees will simply enter a URL (website address) to enter the conference. (source: [|Wikipedia])

Chat Rooms - rooms that can be set up for people to discuss topics. Leads to backchannels - practice of electronically passing notes among some or all of the audience/students during the lecture. (source: [|Wikipedia]) 