Growing My Network

This weekend I have spent some time identifying objectives and purpose for growing my personal learning network (PLN). I have also laid down my thoughts to outline a form of strategy to meet those objectives. Generally speaking, I am not a great strategist and prefer to let life (including networks) unfold without too much intention. I do think that a PLN is an incredibly valuable asset and I feel privileged and overwhelmed by the support and interest that I have received so far from those in my new and growing network. If you are reading this then you are probably part of that network – so thank you. Here are my thoughts and motivations.

Purpose: To continue to pursue my awakened interest in areas and themes that have been highlighted and developed through undertaking the University Certificate in Professional Development –Web Enhanced Practice course. To participate in an open and social, learning environment. To grow a mutually beneficial network of people: who share these interests or some commonality; who can support each other’s learning and development; who can act as critical friends and who are comfortable in offering feedback; who can model good practice; who can share timely, interesting and emerging information.

Objectives and Strategy

Participate, contribute and create content

•Continue to participate in the Twittersphere and to build on contacts through further engagement. Tweet more using #edtech and other hash tags as become apparent.

•Blogs – Keep a number of blogs for different areas of interests. Keep Blogger, Posterous and Amplify for learning and development and Tumblr for personal and creative projects.

•Through experimenting with Posterous, Tumbler and Amplify, I realize that blog posts and blog popularity benefit from posts being more interactive and visually interesting. Use of photos, audio and developing more confidence in video blogging/pod casting is something that I would like to work on. Welcome and promote conversation on blog posts.

•Contribute by commenting on other people’s blogs in a variety of interest areas.

•YouTube – Create video resources and artifacts to share on YouTube and explore the social networking aspects of YouTube.

•Contribute to and share resources on TES “share your resources” page.

Collaboration and knowledge sharing to grow networks

•Continue to contribute social bookmarks to Diigo. Contribute bookmarks to other groups, join a few more groups and develop contacts within these groups.

•Find a wiki project to take part in or start one myself to experience collaborative writing.

Take part in organised learning to grow learning networks

•Investigate Massive Open Online courses and other open educational resources and opportunities

•Take part in #lrnchat and other live conversations.

•Like to maintain contact with UCPDWEP. I hope that a collaborative UCPDWEP learning network will develop in the future. I would very much like to be involved in this and to offer a supportive contribution to future cohorts.

•Join in Second Life groups, attend conferences/events in SL and get involved in other virtual classroom activities.

Search, aggregate, filter and re-distribute information

•Make full and significant use of RSS reader to aggregate relevant information from a variety of sources.

•Re-distribute relevant information to network via Twitter, blogs and Diigo social bookmarking. Use materials and references to create discussions/ conversations/crowd source opinion through networks, for example using blogs, Facebook, wikis and Twitter.

UCPDWEP