Warlick, D. (2009). Grow your personal learning networks. Learning and Leading with Technology, 36(6). David Warlick outlines the uses and the different kinds of Personal Learning Networks in his article. He separates the three different kinds of PLN's into these groups: personally maintained synchronous connections, personally and socially maintained semisynchronous connections, and dynamically maintained asynchronous connections. Those sound pretty fancy, but he gives a logical explanation for each. Personally maintained synchronous connections are those who you use to answer questions, solve problems and accomplish goals. He compared this type of network with going to a meeting at work, except you can attend in your pajamas, and you don't have to see anyone else so you aren't biased. Personally and socially maintained semisynchronous connections are basically connections you make when you post something on facebook or twitter, having something to say without necessarily having a time limit on the answer. These PLN's are the ones you casually look at while you may be doing something else. Examples of these are Twitter, and Google docs. Dynamically maintained asynchronous connections are the ones that deal not with individuals (as the previous two), but with information that we consider useful. With this PLN you should be able to put all of the things that you find useful (for me, like travel blogs, cheap airline tickets, and vacation spots) all in one thing called a "RSS Aggregator." Then, to wrap this whole thing into one, big, information sending and receiving PLN, you can send these useful tips to other people in your other two personal networks. You save the information, and then you can share it with whomever you please, whether it be personal feeds or professional feeds (if you are a PLN network, you probably have many PLN's that you work with). It all comes together as a big information sharing melting pot that you can use to expand your knowledge, and share it with others! Pretty cool if you ask me!
When creating your PLN, where do you even start?
When creating a Personal Learning Network, you should start by understanding what kind of communication, or ideas, or information you would like to have, because PLN's can vary and get pretty confusing when you start mixing ideas, etc. Things like Twitter would be a good way to start because you can find people with your same interests easily, and you can enter specific chats easily. Once you find these people, and the information you would like to have, you can go further and get their blog feeds, and begin RSS feeds too.
You mentioned in the article that you should be careful with what kind of PLN's you enter into because you can become biased to subjects. How would you suggest thinking otherwise?
I think that when you enter specific PLN's you should be careful to believe everything that is presented to you. It's always smart to maybe enter into a PLN once in a while that has the opposite view or approach that you are using, to broaden your mind, and give you a different perspective.
