Personal Learning Network - 2 views
www.tobincls.com/learningnetwork.htm
Daniel Tobin PLN learning education social networking connectivism Education 2.0 rhizome
shared by Keith Hamon on 23 Jul 10
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An important part of learning is to build your own personal learning network -- a group of people who can guide your learning, point you to learning opportunities, answer your questions, and give you the benefit of their own knowledge and experience.
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Keith Hamon on 23 Jul 10Okay, so PLNs as an educational concept have been around for a while, at least since 1998. And not just in education, but in the "real world." The significant change today is that we cannot speak of PLNs without talking about online networks.
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we are all inundated with data (Stage 1) -- all those manuals, brochures, memos, letters, reports, and other printed material that cross our field of vision every day, not to mention all that we receive electronically
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when you take data and give it relevance and purpose, you create information. Information (Stage 2) is the minimum we should be seeking for all of our learning activities.
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This is a key component of QEP: to find ways to make the class data relevant and purposeful information-purposeful beyond simply making a good grade. We suspect that most students never move beyond memorizing the class data so that they can repeat it on the test and then forget it. They never turn the data into useful and purposeful information, much less turn the data into knowledge or wisdom.
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Even when we have information, we must use that information by applying it to our work before we can say we "know it." Until we use it, it remains information. Knowledge (Stage 3) comes from applying information to our work. This is the stage at which most company training programs fail -- too often the content of company training programs never gets applied to the employee's work. To me, this means that the investment in that training is totally wasted.
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Wisdom (Stage 4), that most precious possession, comes from adding intuition and experience to knowledge.
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This is why having a personal learning network is so important -- to provide us not only with pointers to sources of information, but to answer questions, to coach us, to reinforce our learning when we try to apply it to our work.
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First, we must sort through all of the available data to find only that information that is relevant to our learning needs and for which we have a purpose.
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Once we have gathered and learned the needed information, we need to apply it to our work in order to transform it into our personal knowledge.
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Who should be in your personal learning network? The members of your network do not need to be people with whom you work directly. In fact, you do not even need to know the people personally. The members of your network should be people, both inside and outside of your work group and your company, who have the knowledge that you are trying to master and who are willing to share their knowledge and experience with you.
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To establish a learning network, you can ask other people in your group, or with whom you have gone through a training program, to participate in periodic discussions as you all try to implement a new way of working, to support each other and share experiences with each other. Most people are happy to help -- people generally like to talk about their own work and are honored to be asked to share their knowledge and wisdom.
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the value of knowledge increases when you share it with others.
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We need to explore when knowledge is best considered a cooperative, connect-and-collaborate property and when it is best considered a competitive, command-and-control property. When should knowledge be part of the Commons and when should it be proprietary? What about on a test? What about in an essay or research document?
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Building a personal learning network is requires that you not only seek to learn from others, but also that you also help others in the network learn.
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The principle of reciprocity is a key element in building PLNs, and one that most students never learn in grade school, where they are kept in their seats, eyes on their own work, hands to themselves, and forbidden to talk to their colleagues. Who could possibly run a real organization with those rules? It's a model of behavior for an assembly line worker, but not a knowledge worker. Why do our schools have this mismatch?
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A personal learning network can be your most powerful learning tool no matter what the subject.