Warlick, D. (2009, March/april). Grow your personal learning netwrok. Learning and leading, 36(6), Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/learn/publications/learning-and-leading/digital-edition-march-april-2009.aspx
While in the past, people have used other people to accquire knowledge, we live in an age in which knowledge doesn't require us to leave our home. All we need is to switch on the computer, or flip open our phone and the world is at our doorstep. Warlick discusses the three types of PLN's in his article. The first two, "personally maintained synchronous connections [and] personally and socially maintained semisynchronous connections...connect us with each other." (Warlick, 2009) Examples of these would be technology like Skype, twitter and facebook. It allows people to have conversations that "are not exactly conversations." (Warlick, 2009) People can ask questions and recieve answers without haven't to stop doing other tasks, like homework or researching on the web. The last PLN type is "dynamically maintained asynchronous connections...this type often connects us with content sources that we have identified as valuable." (Warlick, 2009) An example of a way that I use the this type of PLN is through the social bookmarking site diigo. Through this site I am able to save web pages that I feel I will need in the future and also pages that have information that I find essential. Warlick finishes his article by telling us to grow our PLN's by not staying within the boundries of our comfort zone, "it is human nature to incline toward sources that agree with our own worldviews, so we must try to cultivate networks that challenge our thinking." (Warlick, 2009) This is an important thing to remember because as educators we are in charge of expanding a child's knowledge and showing them all point of view; not just our own.
1. While increasing our PLN is a great thing, how do we teach students that there are things that they shouldn't explore on the internet without advertising it?
- I think this is something that scares many educators and parents alike. Especially when technology is introduced within elementary classes. I know I was worried when my nine year old brother came home and said he had a video to show me on youtube. My first thought was, "who taught you to surf the web?" As I watched him he navigated his way around ads and videos he didn't want to watch to show me a video that was a cartoon of StarWars. It was evident that my panick was unneccessary and that my brother was being educated well at his school. But the thought of how young he is and how his generation is going to constantly going to be tapping into the internet overwhelmed me. It's gotten easier to accept that this is the world we live in now and that as educator its my job to teach students the safe way to be on the internet.
2. Is there any role that "facebook" can play in a person's PLN?
- While facebook is a wonderful site to interact and connect with people it is merely a social internet tool. While people may refute that it does have knowledge that can be shared with the world, there is no evidence. Facebook is a place where people post status's of their daily events and make irrevelent comments on their friend's pages. People may argue that since facebook doesn't have any "actual" significance and it is merely a fun site on the web, that twitter is the same thing and that twitter has no real signifcance. They would be wrong however in that fact, because through twitter people can network with people in their professions and offer help and resources. For example, education; teachers can network with educators around the world and share information that they find and introduce new technology to educators.
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