How incredibly helpful! After reading this article, I have a much greater appreciation for the communities and how powerful they can be. With the correct planning, preparation, recruiting, and maintenance these groups can be very successful in generating great ideas!

I found this article very helpful! I just recently heard the term "community of practice" for the first time. This article truly helped me to understand that this is not a new thing by any means. A "community of practice" is simply a group of people coming together to achieve a common goal. As Dave mentioned, I also liked how the author explained these communities in the three components of domain, community, and practice. Nice find!

This pages provides ten links that are basically guides for creating effective PLNs. I was going to post them individually, but thought it was more effective to post them here together. As I browsed them - I saw some pretty cool ideas.

This link provides 10 tips for using PLNs and 10 tips for establishing productive ones. Using Diigo is the first tip for establishing a productive PLN - I thought that was pretty cool.

This article explains how students (teens) are using PLNs to organize and share their school work and projects. It also discusses the pros and cons of PLNs.

This article investigates communities and the different steps that one takes to "belong" to a community. These communities facilitate sharing of ideas, resources,and research.

"The basic argument made by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger is that communities of practice are everywhere and that we are generally involved in a number of them - whether that is at work, school, home, or in our civic and leisure interests. In some groups we are core members, in others we are more at the margins." In these communities we share information and resources that further our education.

This article discusses socialization and the accessing of information in the information age. The article claims, "A vast amount of spontaneous knowledge exchange is taking place on the interactive World Wide Web. It is on the basis of this that the theories of eLearning 2.0 and connectivism declare that network participation and access to information and to software that interprets and contextualizes information makes a completely new, cooperative, self-organising form of learning possible."

This article discusses the four principles of learning: autonomy, connectedness, diversity, and openness. It also investigates how these principles and the theory of connectivism have been tested through MOOCs - massive open online courses.

This article is actually an introduction to a course offered by the University of Manitoba. My favorite part of this article is the diagram "that shows how the different elements and various technologies are linked together." However, throughout the article it offers various links that I also found interesting.

This article investigates the beneifts and downfalls of behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism. Then, it dives in to the idea of connectivism, and how we use it to develop new knowledge and skills. The article states that, "This cycle of knowledge development (personal to network to organization) allows learners to remain current in their field through the connections they have formed."

This article discusses the components of the current educational structure and how they can be detrimental to continued learning. It also proposes an alternative structure that promotes shared connections and networking.

http://www.freetech4teachers.com/ is a site that I have found very useful for tips, interesting articles, and some great resources.