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School Library Tech Camp - Thing 7 : Personal Learning Networks

Introduction

Now that you've mastered Twitter, where else do you go for information? Who do you turn to for help? Who are your mentors? How do you learn what you need to know? All of these resources are part of your Personal Learning Network (PLN).  A PLN is your collection of resources, colleagues - local and distant, experts, websites, books, journals, podcasts, videos, social networks – anything that you can turn to when you need help finding out about something. It's also about you sharing your expertise with others.

• What’s your PLN look like now? We all have one!
• What are you trying to learn? To keep up with?
• Who do you want to be connected with?
• What expertise can YOU share with others?

Activity

Read through the following ideas for expanding your Personal Learning Network. Choose one to explore in more depth.

Blogs

Follow Blogs

• If you start following people on Twitter, you're sure to start seeing links to blog posts that will interest you.
• Reading blogs and commenting on posts that interest you is another great way to connect with other professionals in your field.
• What to write? Thoughtful comments that offer your views on a topic, engage other readers, ask the writer for more information  – these are great ways to start getting connected.
• Note who do else is commenting and read their blogs. Do these bloggers have a list of bloggers that they follow? Check out their lists. You’ll start to see names being repeated. These might be the more popular, highly followed bloggers. But don’t overlook the “little guys” either! 

Write a blog

• This is your place to explore ideas and gather feedback from colleagues.  You might not get too many comments when you first start, but if you comment on other people’s blogs and post reactions to their posts on your blog, you’ll start making connections.

Join a Community & Learn

Online communities offer members a place to share ideas, post news, share projects, have conversations around topics and more.  These are two communities geared towards educators.

• Classroom 2.0 - http://www.classroom20.com/ Become a member, participate in discussions, share ideas, get assistance. Over 17,000 members and a very active community. Includes a weekly Live discussion at:  Classroom 2.0 LIVE! http://live.classroom20.com
• TeacherLibrarianNing – http://teacherlibrarian.ning.com/ Joyce Valenza started this community for “those of us who connect, teach, share, and lead in new information landscapes.”
• TL Virtual Cafe - Free webinars for Teacher-Librarians. Past programs are archived. Did I say free? And easy? And really useful!

Facebook

Facebook is one of the largest online communities. For many, it’s a way to keep up to date on what their friends and family are doing. Facebook makes it simple to send a status update that tells all your friends what you’re up to. And you can get updates from all your friends just as easily. 

It’s also very popular for connecting with colleagues. There are many, many librarians on Facebook. After you join, search for names of colleagues and view their public profile. Click on Add as Friend to send them a message.  If they accept your friend request, you’ll be able to see each other’s updates and start communicating. 

Look for friends and colleagues that you truly want to connect with. Better to grow your network slowly and make real connections than have 1000 ‘friends’ you don’t know and don’t care about. 

Getting Started

• Facebook 101 - Nicole Engard's handy step by step tutorial will get you set up on Facebook in no time.

Facebook Privacy

Pay attention to privacy settings. I can't say this loudly enough! Don’t leave your account wide open so that anyone can find out all about you. As soon as you sign up, use the Settings & Privacy menu to check what is public and what isn’t.

It’s a bit of a pain to go through all the settings, but important.  For example: can your photos and notes be seen by the friends of your friends? That exposes your content to a lot of people. Do you want that? Maybe, maybe not. You need to decide.

• 10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know - Essential reading!

Delicious

Delicious is a handy online bookmarking site. It allows you to access your bookmarks from any web browser, wherever you are. This is great for people who use multiple computers and/or want to share their bookmarks with others.

delicious can also help you discover new resources and add to your Personal Learning Network. 

Build a Delicious network

The goal is to find other users who share your interests. Once you’ve added them to your network, you can easily view the links they’re adding to delicious.

• Login to your account
• Find a link of interest by searching for topics or by browsing through your own bookmarks.
• Click on the ‘saved by ## people’ link to find out who else saved that page and read their notes.
• Click on a user’s name to explore the links they’ve saved.
• If their links are of interest to you, add the user to your network by clicking on the ADD TO MY NETWORK link
• Confirm them by clicking on OK

Other ways to add to your network

• Explore the networks of other users. They may be following colleagues that are of interest to you.
• Check your favorite blogs. The blogger may have their delicious identity noted on their blog.
• Add everyone in the class today! Instant karma.

Make delicious work for you

• Subscriptions – Are there some tags you search for all the time? Subscribe to them instead. Click on Subscriptions and Add a Subsciption.  Type a tag and it will be added to your list of subscriptions. Relevant web sites will be listed on the left.
• Share – If you find a site that someone in your network might be interested in, share it with them by adding their delicious user name when you bookmark a site. You’ll see the names of people in your network when you tag an item.
• Share with colleagues not using delicious – Not everyone is using delicious. (why not??) But you can still make it easy to get great resources delivered to them. Let’s say you’re collecting great sites for a Biology teacher. Tag the sites with a unique tag (eg: bio12thproject2). And choose a way to deliver the resources that works for the teacher.
  • Send them a delicious URL so they can see your links right in your delicious page. Eg: http://delicious.com/grdnldy/bio12thproject2
  • Have the teacher add the RSS feed for your that tag to their feed reader. Where’s the RSS? Right at the bottom of the page for that tag. Right click and copy the link location/URL. Send it to the teacher if they’re using a feed reader.
  • Send it to their email with feedmyinbox.com. Enter the RSS feed and their email. Whenever you add sites with that tag, the teacher will get an email update.