Techlearning blog

"It's as if there's a layer of conversation lying on top of the regular web," shared David Warlick at the TechForum Tx that took place on November 10, 2005. At the same time, he introduced the concept of a personal learning network.

Facilitated by blogs and RSS Feeds, the purpose of the PLN is professional development within your area of interest. This idea of building your own professional development network--where you find who you can learn from, ask questions of them, comment on their thoughts and links, and have them do the same for you--is one of the major benefits of blogging and podcasting. It is the art of conversation captured in digital format.

Digital conversations are taking place in the blogosphere...but are you a participant? I recently asked technology directors on the Texas Computer Education Association (TCEA) Technology Education Coordinators' Special Interest Group email list (TEC-SIG) if they were having the types of conversations that others were having. I was struggling with the use of blogs in education, and I wanted other Texas Ed-Tech directors to discuss it with me.

Email lists are no longer part of the inner circle where the best conversations take place. Instead, those conversations are taking place in spaces like Blogger.com, Edublogs, MySpace.com, and the millions of blogs available on the Web and the comments people leave on them. As the masses of India and China find their own voices online, build their own personal learning networks drawing upon many more people than we have access to in the United States, know that isolationism just will not work, either for you, your children or your students.

If you choose to be a part of the conversation, you can learn, contribute and perhaps, learn as others learn. And, learning with others makes the difference since learning is a social process...and has now gone online with blogs. Learning with others means you take control of the flood of information and data coming into your life. There are three aspects to using blogs, podcasts and the RSS feeds that tap into this digital conversation, 3 incentives for building virtual personal learning networks; these are explored briefly below.

1) BLOGS ENABLE PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT NETWORKS
Anne, a blogging teacher, describes the benefits of a blog-based personal learning network. This type of network--taking advantage of blogs and RSS feeds--allows us to tap into people that we would not otherwise have contact with. In a blog entry, Anne writes about how a librarian's blog, The Shifted Librarian, allows her to learn about a conference she could not attend. She writes, "Those learnings led me to even more learning on the blogs of those who had presented. Talk about professional development."

Personal learning networks give us access to varied information sources, and, more importantly, to people whom we can ask questions of, provide us with coaching and mentoring, as well as challenge or extend our thinking. In the connected world that we now live in, NOT creating your own personal learning network cuts you off from what you need to survive and thrive in a "flattened world" (as Thomas Friedman describes in his book, The World is Flat).

Using RSS feeds, we are able to process a greater amount of information than was previously possible by surfing to different web pages. In a moment, we can get the pulse of conversations, then dig deeper as we need to so as to discover what is of merit.

2) BLOGS ENABLE DIGITAL CONVERSATIONS
At David Warlick's presentation at TechForum Tx, one of the presentation slides showed how David was making connections between blogs, building his own personal learning network. For example, he started reading Steve Dembo's blog (Teach42.com), and something mentioned in that blog made him explore another.

Like David, I started out in the same way. I began simply with one or two education-related blogs (e.g. Bud the Teacher and SpeedofCreativity.org) and then added blogs as I went. But adding blog feeds via my RSS Aggregator is not what digital conversations are about. It's not enough to read, it's also important to write.

To accomplish that, I started leaving comments relevant to the entries posted in other's blogs. As I posted each comment, I included a link back to my personal blog. On my blog, I would expand on the conversation in a way that I only hinted at in the comment. In this way, I invited other bloggers to visit my blog and, in turn, leave comments on my web site. The nature of the comments left on my site has been very helpful. They are helpful because they give me information and advice that I wouldn't have had if I depended on my traditional personal learning network. That is, people I interact with every day where I live and work.

In a way that email lists could never do because not everyone can be subscribed to every email list I work on blogs enable me to learn from strangers.

3) BLOGS FOSTER TRANSPARENCY
Blogs enable us to see what others are thinking--or not--as they build a web of connected learning. Most adults automatically protect themselves, although there are ample examples of those who have not, when using virtual spaces like Blogger.com and MySpace.com. It is alright for them to encounter adult content that is considered inappropriate for use in K-12 settings.

However, school policy dictates that participating in these adult sites\u2014adult, not because they have XXX content perhaps but because they deal with adult content including pictures, requires approval. Most teachers and administrators who blog are aware of the lines they must not cross. Blogs and podcasts add a level of transparency that only a few are comfortable with. To be honest, some people don't want to make their thinking known to others. Or, sadly, they do not believe their thinking is worthy of being shared.

The art of digital conversation, of building personal learning networks, is more about knowing when we need information, as well as knowing how to identify, locate and evaluate it. And, then, as if that weren't enough, real life forces us to effectively use that information to solve real life problems. In short, blogging can help us, as well as our students, develop information literacy.