Stages of PLN Adoption
Dave Warlick has taken the concept of the Personal Learning Environment, renamed it (to Personal Learning Network), and is gaining some traction with the concept in the U.S. edublogosphere, as evidenced by this post from Jeff Utecht and another by Marian Thacher. Warlick's diagram looks a lot like the many PLE disgrams (except it has a picture of himself in the centre). More from Warlick here. Utecht adds a PLN adoption diagram, which is essentially the Twitter adoption diagram with different notation. Jeff Utecht, The Thinking Stick, April 3, 2008. [Link] [Tags: Twitter, Google, Personal Learning Environment] [Previous][Next]
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Re: Stages of PLN Adoption
Calling Utecht's adoption diagram "essentially the Twitter adoption diagram" seems overly generous. It's highly generic - probably almost any technology could be substituted for the PLN. Adoption curves just seem to work that way, as, I suppose, students in any Sociology 101 class would be told.
But what I find disturbing isn't the fact that an old model is being heralded as something original simply because it's being used to describe yet another new tool, but the fact that the tool is far from new as well. With all due respect to speed and scope, most internally-motivated learners have been building their own "personal learning networks" since well before they went online. We knew which shelves in the library were our best bets for finding useful materials, which periodicals were worth reading, which book reviewers best directed us to books we'd enjoy. We knew which friends we should consult with when we needed advice, and which to consult with when we simply wanted encouragement. We knew with whom it was worth having a lengthy lunch, and with whom to meet at the water cooler. And taken together, these were "personal learning networks". When, on blog after blog, I read yet another report of "setting up my own PLN", I can't help but wonder what these people were doing not only before Twitter, or any other presently popular tool, but before the internet as well. I'm tempted to write that we've now discovered, in classic Moliere fashion, that "For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing it", except that many people still seem not to have realized this.
Perhaps even more disturbing, however, is the transfer of the entire discussion of Personal Learning Environments from a framework in which it had significant educational ramifications, to an almost narcissistic playground where "mine is bigger than yours" seems the more important issue. I'm not a historian of educational trends, but a good case can be made to show that PLEs within an educational setting represented a counter-paradigm to the Content Management Systems prevalent in online courses. The PLE freed the student from teacher-centered learning and encouraged him or her to take responsibility for his or her own learning. I'm fearful that many of the educators who are enthusiastically reporting on their own adoption of a PLN will also allow that personal involvement to distract them from the real changes still necessary within our schools.
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Re: Stages of PLN Adoption
Yes. Points well taken. [Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]
Re: Stages of PLN Adoption
Yes, we've always had personal learning networks, but to me the point is how they've changed, i.e. from physical to virtual. I have many "strangers" in my network that I never would have had before blogs, twitter, etc. [Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]
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Copyright 2008 Stephen Downes
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