A powerful way to stay current in your field and continuing your professional learning is by maintaining a Personal Learning Network (PLN). PLNs are collections of continually-updating resources, websites, and people related to your discipline. I use my PLN nearly every day to learn new ideas, get answers to questions and problems I face, and to receive feedback on my work. In fact, I used my PLN to receive feedback on this course and website when I was developing it.
For this assignment, you will create your own PLN with Google Reader, Diigo, and Twitter.
Resources and Blogs
Some of the most useful resources in your PLN will be specific to your discipline, but here are some general ones that may be useful to many of you.
- Our Diigo Group (You can count this as one of your “blogs” to subscribe to).
- The Edublogger
- Clif’s Notes
- Web-logged
- Edublog award winners
- Technorati (search for blogs by subject)
- Google Blog Search (search for blogs by subject)
A note about reading your PLN updates: Reading your PLN updates can be overwhelming at first. Trust me, I know! I have somewhere between 1-200 people or resources that I am following/reading about in my PLN! You can’t read a PLN like you would a book—you don’t read every word or even every post. Here’s my strategy: I have some PLN resources that I check daily (the most useful ones), and some that I check when I have a free moment on the bus, at home while watching TV, etc. I skim the headlines, and only read the posts that look relevant to the work I do. Even when reading a post, I typically do a lot of skimming and then only grab the information that is interesting, which I then store on my blog (my personal learning environment) through a blog post or by bookmarking it through Diigo. Sometimes there are great articles that I want to read word-for-word, usually I flag these to read later when I have time to really reflect on what I’m reading.
Resources for Completing the Assignment
Evaluation Rubric
Full credit (10 pts):
- Subscribe to at least 5 blog/rss subscriptions from outside of class
- Subscribe to the blogs of your team members
- Sign up with Twitter or some other social networking application and start following at least 3 new people.
- Post a screenshot on your blog of your filled-out Google Reader and Twitter page.
- Post on your blog what your chosen resources are and why you choose them (the blogs and people you are following).
Partial credit: Fewer resources, or resources appear to be chosen without thought or effort.
FAQs
Question: Can I follow music and sports celebrities, and subscribe to newspapers?
Answer: Yes, if it’s something you enjoy reading, but it will not count for this assignment. For this assignment you need to subscribe to at least 5 educational resources.
Question: What is the difference between subscribing to a blog in Google Reader and simply being a “follower” and reading the updates in Blogger?
Answer: “Following” in blogger is basically the same as subscribing, but you can only follow other Blogger blogs. There are many other good resources out there that are not hosted by Blogger, which is why it is nice to use something like Google Reader. For example, in my Google Reader, I can subscribe to all my friends’ blogs, my professional blogs, the newspaper, daily comics, craigslist postings, etc. It’s all in one place, which makes it much, much more convenient. Google Reader also has more advanced features, such as an ability to easily share articles with other people in your network, and save articles for later reading.
