Learning Networks and Professional Development

Online technologies and practices that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other.” Social media are works of user-created video, audio, text or multimedia that are published and shared in a social environment, such as a blog, wiki or video hosting site.

Method of sharing and organizing online resources Accessible 'on any internet connected computer Subscribe to tags of interest Follow like-minded people through a network

Blogs (edublogs.org, wordpress.com) Micro blogging (twitter.com, plurk.com) Wikis (wikispaces.com, pbwiki.com) Social Networks (META: metamexico.ning.com) Social Bookmarking (del.cio.us, diigo.com) Digital Photo Sharing (Flickr.com, slideshare.com) Video Conferences – Chat (ie. Skype.com) RSS Feed Aggregates (ie. Reader.google.com) Podcasting and Vodcasting (voicethread.com) Virtual Worlds (secondlife.com, lively.com) Web 2.0 generally refers to an interactive read/write Web rather than simply a passive read-only Web.

Learning is a network forming process Capacity to know more is more critical than what is known Learning rests in aggregating diverse, often opposing, views Content is often the by-product of the learning process – not the starting point Connections, not content, are the beginning point of the learning process

Learning can reside in non-human appliances Knowledge can rest within our networks not only internally in ourselves Ability to see connections (pattern recognition) between ideas and concepts critical to learning Currency (up to date knowledge) is the intent of properly created learning networks Decision making is in itself a learning process George Siemens,

Shift tools if they no longer suit the needs of the network. Tag their content to aggregate it. Make content come to them with feeds.

An Open Source project is a software product that is collaboratively built. Everyone has access to help build the product if they have something worthwhile to contribute. No one owns it. No one takes credit for it. Everyone gets to use the product… even those who did not help build it. The “Sage on the Stage” is dead! Most of us just don’t know it yet.

Discovery Educator Network ISTE Second Life for Educators Classroom 2.0 Educational Technologists Using Wiki in Education School 2.0

Professional network generally refers to a professional network service, a virtual community that it is focused on professional interactions instead of social interactions. A learning network is a group of persons who create, share, support and study learning resources (“units of learning”) in a specific knowledge domain.

A model for personal learning environment (PLE) building is proposed The modified Rogers’ model for competence development lifecycle in a learning network is used in order to be examined the main phases in competence progress of each student Social networks contribute to the processes by which learners meet and communicate, and pool, share, learn about and reuse their resources, knowledge and competencies PLE building is found to be a core for PLN and PLN deployment The transition from PLE to PLN is an important step that supports students to become self-organized and life-long learners