My awesome PLN

Earlier today I tweeted this - "I'm relying on you PLN. Without you I am just a single mind."... and of course, I meant it. My PLN is my community of interest and the mirror of my practice. Nobody learns in a vacuum, not even Robinson Crusoe. I cannot begin to describe the amount of new things I have discovered, and continue to discover every day, on Twitter and on other online social environments. It's a treasure house of ideas. It's like having a cafe within reach at all hours of the day. Better still, it's like having a cafe where all your friends, most respected colleagues and also your favourite sages and teachers are always available to sit down and share their ideas with you. The power of this PLN (personal learning network) should not be underestimated. The PLN has always been there of course, but never before has it been available to us in such a widely distributed, accessible and immediate format. The social web has transformed learning networks and is gathering pace as social media and handheld devices continue to evolve in tandem, providing anytime, anyplace learning that was inconceivable for most of the last century. As heard on the BBC Click Technology programme today, social media is the water cooler and the street corner of the Internet. We live in very exciting times.

My PLN is awesome. Sure, I have had a hand in selecting many of the people I follow on Twitter and those I link up with on Facebook, so I have shaped it. But PLNs also take on a life of their own, and people keep popping up who attract me to follow them. This kind of serendipity is what helps to make my PLN awesome. As I continue to learn from others, so the onus is on me to share what I have learnt. There can be nothing precious about this. Anyone who hoards knowledge in today's connected society is deluding themselves that that can actually benefit them in any way. It won't. Give what you have learnt away. Share it with your friends. Make it free to all those who are interested. You won't lose anything, but you will build stronger social and intellectual ties with your community of practice and interest, and as you share your own knowledge, you will discover that it comes back to you with interest.


My awesome PLN by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.