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short, online reading quizzes consisting of open-ended questions that are due several hours before class starts to do the job.  Most of the quiz questions are meant to help students focus on and make some sense of key concepts

Students submit answers to these questions online before class, and I grade their quizzes on effort.

pre-class reading quizzes allow me to practice what is often called “just-in-time teaching.”

pre-class reading quiz questions as a clicker question during class,

how do I implement these quizzes?

local course management system, but I found the system to cumbersome

I find it much easier to post course documents to a WordPress blog, and I like that it makes my course more open to those not enrolled in it. 

I create a Facebook fan page for each of my courses

that pulls in the course blog content via RSS

So I now post my pre-class reading quizzes on my course blogs, tagged with a “PCRQ” for easy locating

default comments feature on WordPress to have students reply to them.  This meant that students could read each other’s answers, which, for these questions, only enhanced the learning experience

So I looked around for a way to have students comment on posts semi-privately—where I could see their comments but they couldn’t see each other’s comments.  I found a WordPress plug-in called, appropriately, Semi-Private Comments!  (Plug-ins—yet another reason I prefer WordPress to a course management system.) 

he main limitation is that it doesn’t help me grade those quizzes

filtering and organization is performed automatically

Articles you saved about the latest gadgets would end up in one section, for example, and those about politics would end up in another

PICK AND CHOOSE content that looks interesting to you and is appropriate for you

2. Remix Once you’ve read or watched or listened to some content, your next step is to keep track of that somewhere. How you do this will be up to you.

Here are some suggestions: - create a blog

- create an account with del.icio.us and create a new entry for each piece of content you access. You can access del.icio.us at http://del.icio.us

take part in a Moodle discussion.

- tweet about the item in Twitter. If you have a Twitter account, post something about the content you’ve accessed.

- anything else: you can use any other service on the internet – Flickr, Second Life, Yahoo Groups, Facebook, YouTube, anything! use your existing accounts if you want or create a new one especially for this course. The choice is completely yours.

3. Repurpose

We don’t want you simply to repeat what other people have said. We want you to create something of your own. This is probably the hardest part of the process.

What materials? Why, the materials you have aggregated and remixed online.

What thoughts? What understanding? Well – that is the subject of this course. This whole course will be about how to read or watch, understand, and work with the content other people create, and how to create your own new understanding and knowledge out of them.

the critical literacies we will describe in this course are the TOOLS you will use to create your own content.

4. Feed Forward

you don’t have to share. You can work completely in private, not showing anything to anybody. Sharing is and will always be YOUR CHOICE.

Critical Literacies 2010, the course about thinking

How this Course Works Critical Literacies is an unusual course. It does not consist of a body of content you are supposed to remember. Rather, the learning in the course results from the activities you undertake, and will be different for each person. In addition, this course is not conducted in a single place or environment. It is distributed across the web.

Go Full screen

Ditch the Home Page

Group and Prioritize

Use Trends

interesting insights into which feeds you really read, when you read them and what you clicked, the real value is in pruning your feeds.

unsubscribe from the dead weight

Tony Wagner, from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, lists assessing and analyzing information as one of the seven survival skills in the new world of work. I think the ability to create a PLN is a fundamental information-management skill that will help my students succeed in the future.

An RSS reader is a Web site that puts together all this information in an easy-to-read format. Google Reader, netvibes, Pageflakes, Bloglines, and my preferred reader, iGoogle, are all examples of sites providing RSS readers. The RSS reader is the raw material for building a PLN.

Even at a digital conference, it's ultimately the people that make that time worthwhile. 

The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, by Cathy Davidson and David Theo Goldberg,

lateral rather than hierarchical modes of learning, individualized educational strategies, global vision, lifelong learning, and collaboration by difference. 

On my way home, I read William Powers' Hamlet's Blackberry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age.  Powers argues that by living in a world where "everyone is connected to everyone else all the time," we become disconnected from our own self-awareness and inner depth. 

Today's digital technology explosion is no different from the advent of language, writing, mass-produced print or the telegraph

Seven Philosophers of Screens: Plato, Seneca, Gutenberg, Shakespeare, Franklin, Thoreau and McLuhan, who lived through other technological explosions

By following the lessons of these seven philosphers in "a tour of the technological past," Powers shows how we can combat "the conundrum of the connected life" with techniques he calls the "Walden Zone" and the "Internet Sabbath," sacred times and places to disconnect with the Internet and reconnect with ourselves and our loved ones.  Both of these books, like the P3 UnConference, celebrates technology not as an end to itself, but as a means to enhance the human experience.  And like the P3 UnConference, both value time away from technology as a way to enhance that experience even more. 

32 Responses to “What is a PLN? Or, PLE vs. PLN?”

Attention Showed video. Wonder why/how some students can divide their attention.

Learning how to read and write has a social component. We can use the ability to work in consort to our benefit. Takes many literacies that have an internal and external component

Used to have people who checked facts of books. When you put a term in a search engine you have no idea whether the information is accurate, credible or bogus.

First ask, "who is the author?", Is there an author. or who takes responsibility for the site.

Personal Learning Networks are very important.

2 questions are now becoming essential. 1. How can you pluck the answer to any question out of the air? 2. How do you know that what you find is accurate?

one program: Evernote

Off-site storage is more secure in the long run,

you need a backup routine

online access to your backed-up files means you have nearly universal access to your work.

2. Let your computer (do some of the) work for you; metadata is your friend.

Tag everything.

hink of tags less as categories or folders and more as the code words in your own personal index.

Documents, images, pdfs, articles, notes can all have as many tags as you want. And items in separate folders can be tagged with the same word or phrase.

Use tags to describe an article in a way the author might not.

Clip articles to read later using Evernote;

install the Evernote clip tools {Chrome and Firefox extensions}

Use EndNote or Zotero to quickly grab citation information

3. Learn to search, not just organize.

Evernote and Google Docs perform OCR by default

, which yields searchable text from what was just an image file. 

at some point, you forget what you have written or what notes you have taken

Evernote is essentially an easy-to-use personal database,

4. Let these techniques and habits help you find patterns that you would not otherwise see.