In this series, Nicky Hockly explains aspects of technology which some people may be embarrassed to confess that they don’t really understand. In this article, she explores Personal Learning Networks and how they can help teachers with their ongoing professional development.
1 ‘Personal Learning Networks’ … what’s that? It sounds a bit like a sect.
Personal Learning Networks (PLNs) – also known as Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) – are the ways in which learners can support their own learning by tapping into existing online networks and resources. Of course, teachers are learners, too, and PLNs reflect the explosion of opportunities that we now have at our disposal to use the internet to access resources and people in the pursuit and support of our own learning and professional and personal development.
2 This all sounds very worthy, but can you give me some concrete examples?
Think about your life and role as a teacher. How could you use the internet to help yourself continue to develop professionally, via contact and dialogue with other teachers from all over the world? Obviously, there are a number of possibilities:
- You could subscribe to blogs about teaching, created by other teachers.
- You could join an online discussion group which focuses on teaching matters.
- You could join some of the newer social networking sites, such as the micro-blogging service Twitter (see ETp Issue 60 for more on this).
- You could join a professional social networking site such as Linked In, and contact other like-minded professionals. (See my article in ETp Issue 61 for more on social networking.)
- You could attend free online conferences such as IATEFL Online.
- You could save your favourite internet sites in a social bookmarking service such as Delicious, which allows you to share your links, and to explore links suggested by other teachers.
Typically your PLN will consist of several different networks and resources, which help you keep in touch with other teachers and with what is happening in the field. Your PLN should actively support the ongoing informal learning that you do as a teacher. I find it useful to visualise my own PLN as follows:
3 How would having a PLN benefit me as a teacher?
Funnily enough, I recently asked a similar question to my own PLN via Twitter. I challenged my Twitter network to define PLN in no more than 140 characters (the maximum permitted in a Twitter message, or tweet). Here is just a short selection of the responses I received. Interestingly, most of the definitions that were sent to me included the things that the teachers quoted here see as the benefits.
4 Well, it all sounds like paradise. Are there no negatives?
Probably one of the biggest challenges that teachers face when they have an extensive PLN is the sheer amount of information they receive. Information overload is a very real issue – there is so much out there, and so much of it is interesting, that it is quite difficult to keep up at times! Teachers who are very active in a number of social networks often report feeling overwhelmed. There are ways to manage this, of course, such as limiting the number of blogs you subscribe to, and making sure that the ones you choose are really helpful and relevant to you. Don’t try to respond to every blog post you read; rather, post comments now and again when you have something to bring to the discussion. You can also cut down your use of a microblogging tool such as Twitter to a certain period of time a day, say half an hour. Feeling overwhelmed can lead to burnout, so this is something to keep an eye on.
5 It sounds interesting. I’d like to create my own PLN – where do I start?
Start by subscribing to a couple of teaching blogs. Go to a few well-known and well-established teaching blogs, and look at the blog roll (list of recommended blogs). A good place to start is Lindsay Clandfield’s Six Things blog (www.sixthings.net), or Jeremy Harmer’s blog (jeremyharmer.wordpress.com). Or try Shelley Terrell’s Teacher Reboot Camp blog (teacherbootcamp.edublogs.org), Scott Thornbury’s A-Z of ELT blog (scottthornbury.wordpress.com), or Burcu Akyol’s blog (burcuakyol.com). All of these blogs (and their blog rolls) are worth exploring. When you’ve looked at 20 or so blogs, choose two or three to subscribe to, to get started.
Next you could join Twitter, where there is already a very active ELT community. How? Go to www.twitter.com, and set up an account. Then search for some of the usernames I mentioned in question 3 above. This will take you to the individual’s Twitter homepage, and you can look at the list of people they follow – follow any of these that look interesting yourself. Keep in mind that you will need to follow between 50 and 100 people before you start to get a flavour of how Twitter can be a professional development tool for you.
Just integrating these two areas into your PLN is a good start. After a few months, you could start to expand your PLN by exploring some of the areas in my PLN word map on page 60. Good luck!
Nicky Hockly has been involved in EFL teaching and teacher training since 1987. She is Director of Pedagogy of The Consultants-E, an online training and development consultancy. She is co-author of Learning English as a Foreign Language for Dummies (John Wiley & Sons), and Teaching Online (Delta Publishing). She maintains a blog at www.emoderationskills.com and tweets under @TheConsultantsE.
This article first appeared in issue 69 of English Teaching professional, July 2010.
