Tools of the trade

I was quite impressed by Joyce Seitzinger's Professional Learning Environment (PLN) model that she presented at Deakin University in Melbourne this week. The first slide on the left shows a quadrant model in which she has used a work/office metaphor to define four discrete functions of a PLN. The first, the Staffroom is quite public, calling on high levels of communication and high profile, and involves the use of microblogging tools such as Twitter. This will work provided the user subscribes to a requisite number of other relevant user accounts, and can share their ideas and converse freely. It will fail if the user does not follow or is not followed by enough other subscribers to enable the benefits of the network effect.

Joyce calls the second quadrant the Filing Cabinet, because essentially, it is low profile and low in terms of the efforts put into communicating with others, and it provides a repository for the user (and their PLN) to store, categorise and possibly share content they think is important to them. Social tagging sites such as Diigo and Delicious can offer this kind of filing cabinet organisation, but so too can wikis and other collaborative tools, which would I imagine, raise the level of engagement and profiling of individuals who organised and shared their content in this manner.

The third quadrant is the Newspaper, which again Joyce sees as low profile and low in terms of communication. I assume that this is because most of the tools she identifies as falling into this category of PLN deployment is push technology (RSS feeds, Google Reader etc). I would imagine that if Joyce placed blogs into this category, (and in the model's present form I see no reason why they shouldn't be there), then a higher profile and higher level of engagement between user and PLN would ensue.

Yet she leaves blogs and other authoring tools to insert into the final quadrant, the Portfolio. This is the quadrant in which a lot of high profile activity is conducted, but I would argue that it is also high in engagement. The question still open to me is whether this model would change from it's current form to represent Personal Learning Networks. Or is there any real difference between these and Professional Learning Networks?

It is worth noting that only the first quadrant of this PLN model is actually performed synchronously, that is, in real time. That may give some a clue as to the latent potential of tools such as Twitter to connect people powerfully and instantly across the globe and to give all of us access to a worldwide network of experts and enthusiasts in any subject for which we have an interest. Everyone should have a PLN, because in today's connected world, without it you are not fully equipped as a professional.

Images courtesy of Joyce Seitzinger


Tools of the trade by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.