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Are you ready to lead a revolution at your school or in your district? Leadership Day 2009. Intro: The Professional Networked Learning Collaborative Back in 2002 in his book Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution Howard Rheingold predicted that, "The 'killer apps' of tomorrow's mobile infocom industry won't be hardware devices or software program but social practices. The most far reaching changes will come, as they often do, from the kinds of relationships, enterprises, communities, and markets that the infrastructure makes possible." The prediction, as we now know, was spot dead on. The technology has transformed our relationships, how we are able to collaborate, how we now define communities, what constitutes a network, and what kinds of work we are able to do. According to Deborah Ancona and Henrik Bresman, authors of X-Teams, "…team effectiveness is not just a matter of managing well around the conference table. Success also depends on team's reaching out across their borders to find needed information and expertise."It is this intersection of collaboration and technology that has now allowed us to create and leverage a new form of boundary crossing Professional Learning Community. It's called a Professional Networked Learning Collaborative.

The presentation will be to debunk some of the myths around the so-called Net Generation by highlighting the lack solid research to support many of the claims. I will present results from research done at BCIT and elsewhere to argue for a more nuanced approach to the use of educational technology to support the needs of this generation of learner.