I began seriously exploring personal learning networks (PLN) while at an ECIS Librarians’ conference in Istanbul in 2011. The Keynote speaker was Joyce Valenza and during her presentation she showed us  how to use Twitter as a PLN and showed us a great tool to curate the tweets – paperli (Valenza, 2011). Paperli curates all the tweets from any of the people you are following or the hashtags you are following – like #tlchat for example. I get to read the tweets of the people I follow once a day in a newspaper type format with links to the content being tweeted about.

Suddenly a whole new world opened up for me. I not only met fabulous presenters at this conference, I could follow them on twitter and immerse myself in their ideas, discussions and best practice. I jumped in and was fully immersed in social media PLN (Utecht, 2008). 

As time went on I discovered that I could follow people’s blogs and when I purchased my first i-pad I discovered apps that would aggregate the ones I found most useful. Twitter was very useful in discovering the top 10 people I wanted to follow. Some of them also had profiles on Facebook and I found that a helpful way to follow.

I glance through the feeds and chose the things I want to read deeply. Then I add them to my diigo account, sharing with relevant groups, and tweet the links to the world.

Somethings I would like to explore next year are:

• to leave comments on people’s posts. I haven’t stopped to do that and I know I love it when people engage with my blogs.
• to participate in a live #tlchat meeting one month. This group has a very active presence on Google plus.

Balance is something I struggle to achieve with a social media PLN (Utecht, 2008). We are fortunate in our school that we have Professional Learning Communities (PLC) and these are a great combination of face to face meeting times and discussing learning through social media. I am quite out of balance at the moment with my Masters studies at Charles Sturt University but I do enjoy the extra PLN that the courses offer. Very shortly I will be on vacation with a lovely few days in a remote part of the South Island of New Zealand. No cell phone coverage, no Internet, just some good books to read and very few distractions.

My PLN meme

References

Utecht, J. (2008, April 3). Stages of PLN adoption [Blog post]. Retrieved from The thinking stick website: http://www.thethinkingstick.com/stages-of-pln-adoption/

Valenza, J. (2011, May). The Wizard of Apps [Slides]. Paper presented at ECIS Librarians’ Conference, Istanbul, Turkey. Retrieved from http://www.slideshare.net/joycevalenza/wizardappsupdatepdf