Well, I’ve been thinking about this post for some time now, and I can already hear the clatter of keyboards as they dash to respond… The thing is – and this is the nub of the post (and a comment I threw in to Twitter this morning) – I think all this ‘PLN’ business is seriously over-hyped and overrated and most people are kidding themselves about just how much they get out of theirs, just how many of their PLN would be friends and mentors ‘in real life’, and just, well, just how real it all is…
So hey ho, here we go – feel free to tell me just how valuable it is to you, of all the new ‘friends’ you’ve made and all the rest. And I do know, of course, that real friendships and professional relationships and things like that are made every day online – I know there are real ‘success’ stories, but I also think there’s a slightly creepy, slightly seedy, slightly self-congratulatory, slightly odd, slightly desperate and slightly unreal side to the whole thing…
Here’s what I know (and I must stress this is a personal post – your mileage may vary)… My best friends are all, with one or two exceptions, people I have first met face-to-face and then continued to contact online due to distance or whatever. I also know that, like most people, I have an optimum number of friends, and that number is very small. I see these people when I can, and I get more out of two hours in their company than I could ever in a few weeks with them online in Twitter.
In fact I got a lot more out of TESOL Spain last weekend than I ever could in a few weeks of Twitter. And yes, I do know that not everyone gets to go to conferences. But really, all that makes Twitter or any other online community (at least for me) is ‘better than nothing’.
Twitter is, of course, fantastic for many things – new links to interesting websites and research, to reviews and all the rest. On a daily basis I probably bookmark half a dozen or so of these (though I never, of course, have time to go and look at them again). It’s great for quick questions to someone, and excellent at JIT training and solutions when you need to know how to do something. But I can’t help feeling that it’s all being stretched a bit far when it gets called a ‘community’ or ‘network’…. Well, maybe it’s a network in the strictest sense.
It’s a bit like Facebook in some ways. It’s ridiculous for me to sign in to Facebook and see my 500+ ‘friends’. The thing is, you see, they’re not really friends, most of them. At best most of them are acquaintances, generally they’re friends of someone I once met at a conference and with whom I had a most pleasant and edifying chat. But that doesn’t mean we should swap holiday photos or call each other ‘friends’. We’re colleagues, perhaps, in the same way that everyone who works at a university is a colleague of everyone else…. Except they rarely meet each other, have nothing in common and probably never will.
The truth of the matter is that we can’t all be sane, nice, amazing people – there must be some loonies out there… Yet everyday people arrange to meet someone they’ve only met online, to stay in their houses and go out for dinner with them, and more… As if it were the most natural thing in the world. And we educators are generally ok, but there must be some mad axe murderers amongst us. Have any of your friends disappeared from a ‘tweet-up’ recently (God how I hate that word)? Perhaps you should check…
I’m a social animal. I love meeting people, talking to them, discussing their work and mine – but I’m sure there are many hundreds of people I’m connected to on Twitter who would find me dull beyond belief, and I’m sure the same would happen to me. There’s been much written on the ‘love fest’ of online communities, and I really do think it’s over-played. It ain’t all rosy, we’re not all due to be the best of friends, and the sooner we get over that, the better.
Twitter has, of course, improved the first-time conference experience for many – and that is an amazing thing. But when people get home after their ‘tweet-up’, do they ever sit down and wonder if any of the people they met would really ever be close friends of theirs in real life? Do we really all find each other so utterly fascinating, lovely and professionally inspiring that we long to retire to a commune the size of Belgium and start a new Utopia? I think not. Twitter has its strengths, but it is also unpredictable and it draws us in to an ever-increasing love-fest where everyone is frilly and pretty (intellectually and personally speaking, of course). And life isn’t like that. I don’t share my family snaps with strangers online, and increasingly I feel uneasy abut doing the same with my ‘PLN’.
And what of other communities? I’ve already mentioned Facebook – to me it’s simply an address book. I sign in, accept invitations from people who are friends of people who are friends of a guy who once talked to me in Buenos Aires, and then I sign out again. Because if I hang around for too long, the second cousin of the woman who gave me a lift to the bloke who was going to arrange my transfer to the airport is going to open a chat window and ask me about ‘some’ and ‘any’. Or maybe for a quick edit on their PhD thesis on mole wrenches… since we have so much in common and all that.
This week I have been invited to join four more communities and two Nings. And the thing is, I’m already over-stretched with work and Twitter and all the rest. And it’s not that I don’t want to socialise with people, it’s that I don’t know what I can bring to yet another community. If everyone is like me, and if everyone is increasingly spread thinner over life’s slice of bread, what good are we to any of the communities we join? The old thing of 90-9-1 really does make sense…
So I’m currently caught between stools, as it were. I love my work and I love technologies and what they can bring to teaching and training. I love technologies for my work, and also for a lot of my play. I love the fact that I can talk to people all over the world at any point in the night and day. But increasingly I find it’s the richness of one-to-one discussions (online or face-to-face) that make more sense to me. Or small group discussions, again, either online or in meat space. What I don’t get, mostly, is how one has a decent discussion on Twitter or Facebook where the interface is simply not rich enough to allow for that.
Most of the discussions or arguments I see on Twitter, as one example, consist mainly of soundbites which are then re-tweeted as gospel truths. You don’t see much critical thinking in 140 characters, nor should you… It’s all so very tiring when you’re an old man 
I’ve more to say on this, I reckon – but there are dozens of seething keyboards warming up to get to grips with this bit, so I’ll leave it here and let you all get on with it. I think I’ll come back when I’ve had a bit more time to think about it, and when I can see what everyone else thinks about it, too. All I can say is that in the past few weeks when I’ve put Twitter on the back burner I’ve done more work, more reading and more in-depth chatting to people than I have all year.
And it’s been wonderful.
Now, I really must go… got to fly to Manitoba to stay with this bloke I met through a friend on Twitter who put me on to his Facebook page and invited in his friends from when he was at college in the 80s. We’re already the best of friends and I’m sure we’re going to have lots in common. I’ll be staying at his place – you can contact me c/o Mad Billy Stokes, Mantitoba
As someone who has withdrawn from both Fb and Twitter (I get this horribly good schadenfreude sensation when I get emails about new Twitter followers, not having used Twitter for well over 3 years now) I largely agree with your conclusion, although I think your argument needs some work.
There is, definitely, a place for relatively empty, light-weight chatter. The person next to you at the airport. The cousin of the airline help desk person who is fixing you a couple of new outfits after the airline lost your baggage. The barista in your local chain coffee shop of choice that you see most days and so on. You don’t really expect to learn from them (you might learn local gossip or something, but not substantive professional learning unless you write for the local newspaper). Then you have your mentors, colleagues and the like from whom you expect to learn more, more often.
Twitter and Facebook fill, mostly, the space of the light-weight chatter. Even with your mentors and colleagues character limits, poor communication systems and the like tend to keep it light-weight. They can be pushed other ways, but it’s not what they’re intended for and it is pushing. Why DM in 140 character exchanges when you can drop into an IM programme or SL and have a much longer exchange quite comfortably, regardless of location in the world. If they’re local of course that can be dropping into the local cafe or pub instead. However, I’m not brave enough to say you can’t find useful learning among the chatter – just like you can find useful learning chatting to the taxi-driver that you never see again.
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Eloise,
Quick off the mark, as always! Yes, I agree – of course some of it will be useful. My central point (however badly put!) is that people claim and expect too much from the lightweight social clients and the relationships they can engender. I reckon that’s probably quite badly put too…
Gavin
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Eloise Reply:
March 18th, 2011 at 8:48 pm
Always easy to be fast off the mark when there’s a basic agreement with the conclusion.
But stating it as “people indulge in hyperbole about the quality of the learning through their light-weight social clients” is not quite what I read in your original, not quite what I said in my reply but something I think we can both agree on. Other’s will not I’m sure!
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I think the point is that a PLN is different things to different people. It’s a group of autonomous professionals looking for an interdependent learning environment, some people want edtech links, others want advice on how to do stuff and others might simply want another teacher to talk to. I consider it mainly professional and any relationships I have started on twitter I compare to the ones I would make with new colleagues at work. In any workplace some colleagues become friends, but others don’t. Some might be annoying or smell, but I won’t know until I meet them! Real-life or online, it’s the same people with the same personalities.
As for the professional benefit of a PLN, I think ideas about open education present a strong argument for the development of a PLN. I think the fact that an ELT network of like-minded individuals is interacting of their own accord online, using social-media and without an institutional infrastructure, represents the huge amount of talent, motivation and potential in the field. I think a lot of learning does take place, more so through blogging than using twitter though, as blogging allows for reflection and articulation of thought in a better way than 140 characters ever could. Twitter just sort of oils the wheels, I think. My learning from the PLN has been less about what others have told me than what others have made me think.
Like you, I have had, and probably will continue to have, doubts about it. As you say: “there’s a slightly creepy, slightly seedy, slightly self-congratulatory, slightly odd, slightly desperate and slightly unreal side to the whole thing”. However, I still think it is a hugely motivating and powerful ‘movement’ of people who truly desire to develop themselves and improve their teaching so that they can offer a better education to their students, which I think is hugely admirable.
If there’s one thing that’s too much for me though, it’s Second Life. Perhaps I just don’t get it! ; )
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Funnily, you were the very first person I “followed” at the beginning of my first venture into Twitter. I abandoned the whole thing after a couple of weeks.
On joining again after some considerable pressure from others, I still find it largely impenetrable and largely a very solitary thing. I’m not sure if it’s because of my twitter-tone or whatever, but it is like standing on the high street shouting. Both have the same net result – people ignore me.
I have enjoyed the series of twitpics you have “tweeted” over the last couple of weeks. I think I commented on one.
“See” you at the next “tweet-up” – praps
Candy
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Gavin Dudeney Reply:
March 18th, 2011 at 9:32 pm
Candy,
Welcome! I’ve read your comment, and thank you for it. I’m trying to bite my tongue for a while to see what others think…
Gavin
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You say you don’t like the word “tweet up”, well I don’t like the (word ?) PLN. I feel it’s so anonymous and blobish. I am not a PLN, I am not number 6, I’m a free person !
I agree about the over hype and agree too with Eloïse.
Voilà ! not a very deep long response, but “better than nothing” !
Bonne soirée !
Alice
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Manitoba? In March? Good God, man. There’s a reason why they have “BUT IT’S A *DRY* COLD!” on the bottom of their license plates.
I read your Tweet this morning with interest, and I’m still left with the same question that I had then. PLNs are a wonderful concept, but as they stand now, how do they differ from cliques? From what I’ve seen, most of them function best as mutual admiration societies, with very little sharing going on between re-tweets and Follow Friday messages. (That said, thank you for the advice on the iPad. I did learn a lot from that.)
It would be encouraging to see people want to extend contact beyond Twitter contact, going out for drinks and meeting at conferences and commenting on blogs to new people, not just the ones they already know. That would be a step towards real networking…
Graciès i bona nit.
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On the whole I agree with you Gavin. I could have written this paragraph myself:
“Here’s what I know (and I must stress this is a personal post – your mileage may vary)… My best friends are all, with one or two exceptions, people I have first met face-to-face and then continued to contact online due to distance or whatever. I also know that, like most people, I have an optimum number of friends, and that number is very small. I see these people when I can, and I get more out of two hours in their company than I could ever in a few weeks with them online in Twitter.”
I get more out of chatting to half a dozen friends at my local pub on a Saturday night than I do out of a whole week of browsing the Web. Twitter is OK for picking up links and for occasional bits of information, but on the whole I find it confusing. Turn your head for a couple of hours and the interesting threads you were following have got lost in a mass of idle chit-chat. I deliberately avoid accepting lost of new friends on Twitter or Facebook. I can’t handle large numbers of friends or followers, and I don’t want to anyway. Facebook is my fun area. It embraces my family and real friends, and a few people I have met at conferences. Don’t expect to much serious stuff from me on Facebook. Most of my postings have nothing to do with my professional life.
I wrote a blog contribution a short while ago with the heading “My life online”. It sums up how I see the my computer as a window on the world:
http://ictforlanguageteachers.blogspot.com/2011/01/my-life-online.html
Regards
Graham
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Agree with Richard that a PLN is different things to different people; in my case, the emphasis is on the personal, i.e. the small-ish number of people I connect with regularly, learn from, and share information with rather than how many people I friend and follow, etc.
Agree up to a point that the concept of a PLN is over-hyped at times too, though having said that I’ve learnt a lot of things from networking with people on twitter that I probably wouldn’t have done otherwise… and I’ve also met many people that I respect and genuinely like through twitter and other sites (such as Second Life, Nings, etc).
Yes, I get more from F2F encounters at conferences, but by the same token, I do wonder how much socialising and networking I would be doing at conferences if I hadn’t already connected with people online and arranged to meet up with them beforehand… probably not a lot, I suspect. I’d probably be wandering round aimlessly between workshops on my own, bored shitless, instead of forging deeper connections with people I’d met online I that liked enough to want to get to know better.
I agree that it can be hard to have a decent discussion when you are exchanging online messages, but then again, there’s no law that says the conversation has to stay there and can’t move to somewhere else where you can (such as, for example, SL or Skype).
All depends on how you approach it I suppose, but on balance, I’d say the positive aspects outweigh the negative ones for me.
Sue
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I think that however many of my blog posts, tweets etc. one could track down and read one would never find me having referred to Twitter as my PLN – it isn’t and never has been! However some of the people from whom I do constantly learn are on Twitter, some of the Naace people, the #UKEDCHAT people, Mirandanet and a few techie gurus as well. I guess if I was pushed into naming members of my PLN there would be about 30 people, some friends, colleagues and some of whom I have never met. There are some tweeters whose tweets I try to catch and thousands I am happy to miss. I intensely dislike the follow Friday and Teacher Tuesday and have, at times, threatened to “unfriend,” another awful, contrived word that has entered the English language, those that name me and thank goodness it rarely happens these days.
However – I still do like Twitter as a back channel, I tweeted quite a lot through the last few day’s Naace conference and people were telling me they enjoyed reading the posts as they were in different breakout sessions, also I changed which breakout sessions I attended on the strength of what was being tweeted! Between all of us Tweeters using a hash tag people not at the conference were able to keep up with much of what was happening. We even got a tweet that came into Naace saying – ‘What happened, you have all stopped – is it a break?” When we told him it was scones and cream he was even more envious!
I have posted rubbish I know – some may say all that I post is rubbish – fine, I don’t have a problem with that! Sat waiting in the dentist, for a haircut, in traffic jams – yay – post a rubbish tweet to pass the time
On balance I would rather have it than not have it, when something has to go it is usually Twitter and recently doing both an on-line course, EVO and full time work it did not get looked at for days but that really doesn’t matter. I didn’t read any blogs either – they were all there when I wanted to catch up and due to some people’s saturation postings I don’t think I really missed much!
Several people have said, and I am pretty sure you were among them, if I need to know something it will find me – it is true!
Carol
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I must say I totally agree with Sue about “conferencing” and Richard about staff room collegues and your initial remark that twitter contacts are better than nothing. Better than nothing sounds a bit mean and untwitterish in view of the great professional development my twitter “friends” have brought me. But it is litterally so much better than nothing for the hundreds of us who are not jet setting around the world but getting on with life in our classrooms alongside collegues who are totally computerphobic.
I too was blocked by the way the word “friend” is used online … until I realised that I has not adapted to the new meaning:
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
I’ll give you the “slightly congratulatory ” too, but from there to seedy now that’s a big jump. On the contrary, adapting to the extremely positive twitter tone was a learning experience for a grumpy old bag like me
cu in Istanbul friend
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Twitter, Facebook, et al are what you make of them. If you want to use them for shallow chatter, then you can surround yourself by chatterers. If you want to play the “look how many followers I have” game, then automatically follow everyone who follows you, regardless of what they have to say.
Set up a Facebook page for your workmates and colleagues and people you meet at conferences. Use your FB profile to share baby photos with friends.
If you want to be extremely positive, go for it. But I don’t see any reason not to be grumpy old man or woman, if that’s you.
Unfriend people who bore you. Go on. It’s not difficult. Say interesting, passionate things yourself, and you’ll attract like-minded individuals.
But it’s just a platform, a system, a collection of lines of code hosted on a server somewhere. Make it what you want it to be.
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I’m in library school and I get alot of good use out of twitter following and chatting with fellow students. One time I introduced myself to someone when we were backchanneling during a conference and we enjoyed connecting that way. I follow many other leading librarian types and enjoy seeing their links.
I definitely don’t use it as a personal megaphone–it’s more professional. I follow certain hashtags that relate to my interests. I use it for research. But I don’t follow it slavishly–it’s a stream to dip into when I have time.
I’ve only been using it since last April and quickly unfollow people who annoy me. That helps.
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[ posted on behalf of Ken Wilson ]
Gavin,
first of all, thank you for treating the PLN acronym with the suspicion that it deserves. My problem with ‘Personal/Professional Learning Network’ is that it makes all of you out there sound like an amorphous mass that’s only there to service my work needs.
re twitter, Facebook and the rest – they’re just more circles of people who float in and out of your life. These circles have always existed, social media have just added to them. For some people the inner circle is family, although some of us do our best to distance ourselves from all or part of that group; the next circle consists of the people we call friends, who may have found themselves there via home, school, college, work or online.
The next circle consists of college mates, colleagues, clients, customers etc – people who are all right, but you wouldn’t want to spend any more time with them than is absolutely necessary. Floating in and out of these is another circle of people who provide services to you and with whom you have a more or less OK relationship, but only when they’re doing their job. For example, I love talking to my dentist about the archeological excavations he does in Malta, but I wouldn’t want to go with him to do it. And I think he’d be surprised if I suggested it.
Social media are simply another circle that weaves in and out of these pre-existing ones.
You mentioned the value of social media for people who are attending conferences by themselves, and I think you can’t overstate the importance of that. And the fact that, as you say, there’s usually someone to talk to online 24/7 if you feel like doing that. But the really great thing about twitter and Facebook and the rest is that you can take it or leave it – dip in and out every day, or leave it alone for a while and come back, as I just did after two weeks of enforced FB and twitter-exile in China. It’s all stuff to use as and when you want.
And when the dust settles, your real mates are still there.
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Nice post and some great comments too. Not quite sure that PLN is the right word but I have learnt a hell of a lot from my PLN and I rarely ( if ever) look on Google to find good/interesting websites that I might like to use. Nearly all my material comes from Twitter.
I remember travelling home from Paris TESOL thinking how much I have been enjoying recent conferences. Instead of standing in the corner , not knowing what to say to a group of people I hardly know, I find myself saying hello to people I have been sharing stuff with on the Twitter/Facebook. It doesn’t always lead to a long lasting friendship but I do feel a certain “link” with these people, especially those whose tweets I really look out for. It is an opening, a way of breaking the ice and it has led to some great chats sharing ideas, having a beer together and some fun nights out…so I can’t knock it.
I am not keen on the term “PLN” and possibly there are moments when it is a bit self congratulatory etc, but overall it has really helped me. In the last few months I have called upon Twitter a number of times when preparing talks and stuff and people reallly come up with some great stuff.Today I have been on Twitter for about 30 mins and found 3 superb links that I intend to test out and even come across your very interesting blog post!!!
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As many have already mentioned here, different strokes for different folks. Whether we’re calling it PLN or anything else, who cares really? As long as people are getting something positive out of it, surely it can’t be a bad thing. I’m lucky enough to have a wonderful staffroom at school with top professionals, but not everyone is that fortunate and, from what I’ve gathered, there are many people out there who work indepedently and PLN (or whatever you want to call it) has made up for the staffroom they don’t have.
People use social media in many different ways and for different purposes. If people are happy with what they’re getting out of it and if twitter/facebook & PLN contribute to their happiness, than great! The world is badly in need of happy & passionate people! So I say…let it be!
A
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I have come to a similar conclusion in a slightly different way, I think. I had my twitter phase (it’s not like I’ve entirely given up on it, but it’s much more background than it was a year ago), while for Facebook I sort of left it and then came back, and now I’m fully back into a Facebook phase (despite hating much of what facebook does in terms of privacy and politics). I think the reason is that I made a semi-conscious decision to only connect with people on facebook who I actually know (and for the most part, know in what I think of as a real face to face way). And so those connections have always seemed more real. (and also facebook does allow discussions that can be followed and joined in with in a way which twitter really doesn’t)
Twitter is now merely a place where I get (and share) links. Indeed i came to this blog post from there. Which means that it is still worthwhile, but not quite so much like the virtual staffroom that I found it to be last year. Having said that though, I’ve “met” (and subsequently in some cases met) a lot of very excellent people through twitter. And I’m glad about that.
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By the way, you know you can turn the chat thing off in Facebook and always appear offline, don’t you?
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I pretty much agree with the post, Gavin. The idea that a PLN is created simply by being part of these networks doesn’t make sense to me. It is also true that such networks help when you do meet at conferences, but that doesn’t make Twitter into a PLN. And simply garnering bits of useful information from such networks doesn’t either. Few people would suggest that any “learning” should be undirected, but that is how many treat a PLN. I think there are great opportunities for such networks to provide a real basis for a PLN, but it needs to be done actively in my opinion, not passively. By doing this, and stepping back a bit from the intensive involvement in such networks, we might actually have more time to develop in a more structured way.
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Interesting post and it’s good to challenge these things. We’re all caught up with PLN and the rest of it and it’s good to stand back and look at what we’re doing in the ‘cold light of day’ so to speak. I agree a lot with Sue’s comments and can empathise with her ‘conference’ experiences and have often found myself in the same situation – less so now. I also agree with Russell that you can indeed learn a lot from those you gather around you online. I think that there can also be a tendency to get carried away by the crowd and it is important to remain true to your own person and your offline experiences. In the end I believe that we are richer through our association the online world.
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I’ve always found the PLN a bit touchy-feely for my cynical (English) self, but I can’t deny that I have found things of use there… Having said that, I think there was a phase when I found twitter to be the most useful about a year ago… Seems to be a common theme here… I wonder if it’s to do with the number of people I (and the people I follow) follow. On the other hand it could just be because I’m a lot busier for other reasons… It would be interesting to compare tweeting around IATEFL & ISTEK this year to last year’s events.
I think the key thing is to be careful what to expect.. I’ve spoken to some very interesting people, but that’s the key – spoken to. I wouldn’t necessarily want to swap holiday pics etc with them. The colleagues analogy above is good, there are some that can become friends, but for the most part they are just good people to talk to on a professional level.
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Gavin…all,
I wish we had never bothered to give a PLE/PLN a name, because the moment we did it needed to be defined and I’m not sure that is a good thing. I’ve always been a firm believer that there is a huge disconnect, especially in our field, between a push for technology access and the cognitive skills to really use it. This is, for me, where PLE’s and PLN’s come into the question. They need an invisible hand- a design- and if you can get this pedagogy right- a combination of professional development, self-expression, and more traditional LMS-based course work- then you have a real chance to breath life into the concept of the PLE. But it aint easy…that is for sure…
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First I have to say that I found your website via Twitter. I have not been using Twitter for long, but I have found it very useful for finding new information about technology and learning links. I never considered anyone I followed to be a “friend” like Facebook. I have slowly added people to my PLN. Most of the people I follow retweet what is interesting out there so I don’t have to follow many. Is it better than the blogs I follow? Not really. However, it widens my net for capturing good resources. I think for international educators Twitter is a gold mine!
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Thanks for the food for thought as always, Gavin, and sorry I’m coming a bit late to this.
I think the term PLN has been bandied about so much that it’s started to lose meaning. some people use it top mean the people they are connected to on Twitter. Others dislike the word ‘personal’ and try to replace it with ‘professional’. You hear some cry that it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to them since they were born, and others claim it’s just a way of giving away your privacy and letting potential thieves know when you’re not at home.
Let’s look at some examples I recently heard people say:
“Join X – it’s a ready-made PLN”
“Our organisation is working on creating PLN software for students”
It’s worth considering that the term PLN developed from PLE (Personal Learning Environment) and that this was proposed as an alternative to the VLE (Virtual Learning Environment, such as Moodle, Blackboard, etc) that has become a popular way for organisations to manage students in courses.
Why did the PLE emerge? The problem lies with VLEs and the fact that they are tied to organisations. Learners spend time learning from and adding their own content to VLEs, creating bonds with other students, engaging in discussions, etc. But, once a learner is no longer studying a course or enrolled in the degree, or, in the case of a teacher, working at a particular organisation, then they are usually unenrolled and their content disappears from the platform.
I’ve seen it recently in a short Project Management course I’ve done online. A group of people come together, we get to know each other, engage with the content in the VLE and participate in discussion. and then the course ends and everything we have done is removed. this system does not encourage you to keep a record of what went on (unless you laboriously copy and paste content from forums, etc) or to keep in touch with the people you meet. It’s a short term solution in a world which requires a long term view (we’re all lifelong learners now).
The most glaring example of the VLE / organisational approach to online/blended learning can be seen if you do any research about e-portfolios. The idea of an e-portfolio was touted as the way that learners could keep track of their learning over time, and there was a lot of interest in this about 8 years ago or so. It is still a valuable concept, but if you do any research about it (as I did for a presentation I gave at the ISTEK conference last year) , then you come across a very ironic and disappointing aspect to it: Most of the links to ‘good examples’ of e-portfolios mentioned in the literature lead to dead ends. The examples have been removed because they were hosted on institutional spaces and VLEs and the students who produced them no longer study at these places.
Anyone who is serious about online e-portfolios now (and thinking of the longer term, as you should be), would not suggest an institutional approach. It requires ownership by an individual. The same idea is behind the concept of the PLE.
Apart from ownership, another reason for encouraging people to use a PLE and create their own PLN is one of choice. People should be encouraged to use the tools they are most comfortable with, and which allows them to learn in the way that suits them. They should also be encouraged to surround themselves with a group of people that they are comfortable with and who will help them learn, and who they can also help learn. This, for me is the concept of PLE/PLN, not the one that has been outlined in the blog post and comments above.
Now, this is where the idea of joining a Ning called ‘PLN’ or ‘PLE’ doesn’t help matters. You cannot join a PLE or a PLN by pushing an accept button. It needs to be built by you, and I think it is not exclusively online either. The ‘Personal’ in PLN is important because it’s unique to you. It can include friends and colleagues you see face-to-face and also those people you run into at (not online) conferences, etc. In short, it’s the people you connect with that help you learn (or develop professionally, in the case of teachers) and this can be a small number (if you are happy with that) or a very large number of people.
It’s not about trying to make best friends out of thousands of people (something which you’ve already said is impossible). Networking with people (online or offline) will also lead you to meet some people who you’d rather not know, but that’s life and how much contact you have with them is entirely up to you.
It can also lead to unpleasant experiences (documented elsewhere on this blog). I have had my share of this too, which continues to have repercussions both personally and professionally: there’s a particular troll/spammer out there who has started a vendetta against me and continues to bad-mouth (some have said libel) me and the organisation I work for on Twitter and elsewhere.
I dislike this and feel uncomfortable when I have to explain this to people I work with, etc. who come across these comments, but it has not in any way diminished the way I feel about connecting to colleagues online and making new friends / contacts in social networks. The reason for this is because of the enormous benefits I’ve gained through building my PLN and from having an online presence. These include everything from international speaking engagements and offers to join projects to getting to know (and establishing real friendships with) people both online and then in person.
Hope all of this makes sense. I understand and sympathise with a lot of the views expressed here and healthy suspicion of the term PLN (especially the way some people use it) can only be good. I do, however, believe that if you take the term to mean what I think it’s meant to be, that it stands for the people you choose to surround yourself with and learn from, then nobody who’s written here would be against that.
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Thanks for you post which has brought fresh air and dusted off some of the glitz surrounding recent talk about PLNs.
While PLNs have their place (and as other people have commented, is something that each individual has to define and control) I think that a much more interesting pedagogical concept is Personal Learning Environments as defined some years ago now by Graham Attwell http://www.pontydysgu.org/2008/12/how-my-personal-learning-environment-is-changing/.
I say this because Graham’s definition puts the learner and their awareness of the learning process as central and the tools the learner s/he uses or the environments where learning happens as dependent on what works best for the individual.
So arguments as to whether Twitter is wonderful, facebook is fab or conferences are more comfortable, are placed in the context of what the learner decides are most effective for them at a given point in time and are things to be built upon or discarded as the learner continually redefines where s/he wants to go/wants to be.
Best,
Ann
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Folks,
Just wanted to say thanks for all the comments so far, and for taking the time. There are many good points in there, and many good reasons to build up a circle of like-minded individuals to share things with and to learn from. But it’s the ridiculous jump that annoys me…
The jump to: you’re awesome, all of you… I’m awesome…. everything you do is brilliant and excellent, every blog post you write is incisive and marvelous, all your actions are amazing, you make my day… My latest blog post is awesome, my shoes are awesome…. the pasta I made for dinner is amazing…. you’re an amazing educator for whom I have the utmost respect. Your latest book gave me more fulfillment than my entire life has done to date. Everyone I know in Twitter is my intellectual lover. I’m coming to live with you all. You’re coming to live with me, Your words drip wisdom…. I could go on….
It’s not all good… it never will be…
Gavin
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Anthony Gaughan Reply:
March 27th, 2011 at 6:47 pm
Such a jump would be ridiculous, if it happened. However, I wonder how much it really does happen. Perhaps I am still too wet behind my (virtual Web 2.0) ears to have noticed…
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Sorry, I’m back again – but I have to thrust my two cents worth into the comments about overweening self-congratulatory tendencies that some PLNs encourage. It seems to be endemic and not restricted to PLNs – think X- factor et al. I wrote a blog (which isn’t that fantastic) about this very thing. If very mediocre beige people keep telling more mediocre beige people how MARvellous they are, somewhere along the line people start to lose their critical faculties. And this together with the banning of telling school children they aren’t all that is giving us a whole generation of young people who have no idea how to tell good from bad and the result is a huge amorphous soupy thing of indistinguishable stuff that everyone thinks is STUNNING and AMAZING and AWESOME.
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Hi Gavin
Thanks for this post. Like you, I used to get annoyed by all the hyberbole ? read this blog post it’s AWESOME, follow this person she’s BRILLIANT, you HAVE TO join this PLN. And so on. I was even taken in by it for a while, with the inevitable disappointment.
But now I have a different strategy. I just assume that people in Twitterland simply use a different variety of English to the one I use in my world. I do the same when I speak to my teenage kids – they don’t speak my language either. Twitterspeak is just one of the many Englishes that we have to deal in this global world of ours. So in Twitterspeak AWESOME means ?slightly interesting?, BRILLIANT means ?pretty much like everyone else?, and you HAVE TO means you ?could, but you probably shouldn?t?.
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Hi Gavin,
First of all, thank you for this post.There were many interesting discussions and this is a subject that’s sometimes brought up in our department, too.As someone who is almost a twitter virgin, I have to say that, I have really taken a lot of benefit through the links and blogs my PLN twit. I also like reading discussions. I am not so sure if there is any harm in good words as opposed to bad and heart-breaking words, eventhough some of the good words may not be sincere. We are not living in a perfect world and none of us are angels. Pln means different to different people as Richard said and ı believe facebook and twitter mean different to different people. The important thing is how you use them and what benefits you get from them. I also find lots of videos and materials that are so much inspiring. In real life you can’t delete a person whose conversation you don’t particularly like, but on facebook and twitter you can. Also, you don’t have to read, or watch things that you don’t want to read, or watch, it is that simple.It is a matter of the right button. In today’s word when time for doing anything is like gold, these social networks makes life easier and whatever harmlessly makes you happy is good. I also believe that it is not the length of the time that you spend with someone makes him/her your best friend, but it is the quality and one can never know who, where, and in which situation becomes one’s best friend….cheers
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[...] a quick guide here: Twitter for Educators ) but now there are a few more dissenting voices (See this post by Gavin Dudeney). As with all big discussions, some of each side of the argument is correct. [...]
[...] On PLNs « That'SLife [...]
[...] Gavin Dudeney’s comment on his post On PLNSs by Gavin Dudeney There is a certain you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours love fest within the blogging environment. There also tends to be a fear of criticising, even if constructively, PLN’s lessons, activities and posts. Where once the Internet was filled with anonymous (and misguided) courage, now taking responsibility for comments can suppress real professional growth. This comment, even more than the post itself, is often something I’ve felt. [...]