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If you are like me, where to start looking for PLNs to join leaves you a bit overwhelmed. Many of us already familiar with Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter-- but what about other options? This brief article offers up 5 additional PLN resources, most of which were new to me. It could be a great resource for finding PLNs to join.

Great list of resources! I have only heard of the EdChat before, but will be looking into the others. Thanks for sharing!

Thank you for finding this resource! Some of these are completely new to me. I look forward to learning more.

The author of this article, Etienne Wenger, is one of the leaders in the field of communities of practice. Wenger briefly defines and describes communities of practice. He also explains how communities of practice are being applied in organizations, government and education. The resource is a great overview for those wanting to understand the basics of communities of practice.

This article looked at a Web-based survey and its results in order to make a correlation between gratifications and uses of social networking sites (SNSs) and an individual's political and civic engagement in the real world. This survey targeted the Facebook Groups application to look at how participation compared to offline activities, mainly due to this feature's ability to recruit members, share common issues, and organize off-campus events. The survey identified four main needs for Facebook Groups involvement: 1) socializing, 2) entertainment, 3) self-status seeking, and 4) information. However, as this survey was trying to draw links between online and offline involvement, the need for information was recognized as having the most impact on participation in real-world activities.

Even though I am not a K-12 teacher, I found this simple infographic list 10 reasons why you should have a Personal Learning Network. A Personal Learning Network can help inspire you to take on a new challenge, encourage new ideas, and keep you connected with other teachers passionate about teaching.

Love this graphic! It makes the PLN concept so simple and easy to follow. I must have reviewed the same article.

The infographic included in this post is great. It helps understand the need for PLN's in a simple way.

This article includes valuable information about the theory of connectivism and well as an introduction to PLNs. It discusses the need to externalize learning to make sense of it. The author goes on to explain how social media can help accomplish this. In addition, it gives the background of PLNs and explains how it gives teachers the opportunity to impact multiple communities

This graduate dissertation was particularly interesting to me since it focuses on K-12 Spanish teachers. The author discusses how communities of practice can be used as professional development and ongoing language training, particularly for non-native speakers. The research includes the use of technology in that the community of practice studied was conducted online.

I can see the use of CoP being very beneficial for non-native speakers. The technologies are the tools that would help to bridge the learning gaps and support learners. Non-native speakers often feel very isolated in learning environments, as having more than one learning group would be helpful. What a great dissertation topic.

In this article Mark McBride, a librarian at Buffalo State College, discusses the recent changes that he made to his information literacy course. He talks about how he incorporated constructivist principles and problem-based learning activities into his course structure. In the process of making these changes, however, he discovered that he is really incorporating connectivism into his classroom. He makes the case that librarians should begin to adopt connectivist principles when teaching information literacy concepts. Additionally, he acknowledges that if librarians are going to move in the direction of the connectivist theory, the Association of College and Research Libraries must take a look at its information literacy standards and update them to acknowledge the ways in which learners can share and create information through the use of social media.

A personal learning environment (PLE) describes the components that make up the educational platforms that a learner uses to achieve educational goals. While an LMS is considered course-centric, a PLE is, thus, learner-centric. An open network learning environment (ONLE) can help bridge the gap between a PLE and LMS. ONLEs encourage social networking collaboration. This article demonstrates that online courses that are built within various Web 2.0 resources drive students to create unique PLEs within ONLEs, and ultimately to become "global digital citizens."

This site provides news, information, and articles for college and university faculty members and administrators on topics such as diversity in the classroom and work place, online learning, and career building.

Summary: This research delves into the use of personal learning networks with teachers via survey. The two main sites used among the responders were Facebook and Twitter. A user of Twitter expands their network when they deem they have found someone interesting, whom they have learned something new from. It continues to discuss features that would be needed with both sites in order to further future professional growth opportunities

My favorite site to find intriguing Sociology and Psychology articles for my high school students.

This source is a chapter in a book by several librarians from the IUPUI library system. The librarians set out to find ways in which they could collaborate with faculty to promote a more successful information literacy program on campus. The importance of this issue gave them the impetus to form a community of practice. This group consisted of both faculty and librarians who were all dedicated to discovering best practices for teaching and assessing information literacy concepts. The authors concluded the chapter with a discussion of some of the campus initiatives that came out of the CoP activities and what they may do in the future to further the growth and retention of student information literacy skills.

Thanks for sharing this article, Kelly. I appreciated the discussion of campus initiatives, including the student pre- and post-surveys, which yielded "abysmal" results. Even with those results, though, the initiative was successful in sparking the campus to start operating as a CoP.

This article gives an overview of what Connectivism is and how learning happens in the digital age. Siemans describes the basic principles of how learning is a network of information sources referred to as "nodes." It doesn't describe how learning occurs within but how learners connect with the networked world of people and information.