Keith Hamon's List: PLN

• 1. A personal profiler that would collect and store personal information. 2. An information and resource aggregator to collect information and resources. 3. Editors and publishers enabling people to produce and publish artifacts to aid the learning and interest of others. 4. Helper applications that would provide the pedagogical backbone of the PLE and make connections with other internet services to help the learner make sense of information, applications and resources. 5. Services of the learners choice. 6. Recommenders of information and resources.

• Try and find that balance between learning and living. Understanding that you can not know it all, and begin to understand that you can rely on your network to learn and store knowledge for you.

• An important part of learning is to build your own personal learning network -- a group of people who can guide your learning, point you to learning opportunities, answer your questions, and give you the benefit of their own knowledge and experience.
• we are all inundated with data (Stage 1) -- all those manuals, brochures, memos, letters, reports, and other printed material that cross our field of vision every day, not to mention all that we receive electronically
• when you take data and give it relevance and purpose, you create information. Information (Stage 2) is the minimum we should be seeking for all of our learning activities.
• Even when we have information, we must use that information by applying it to our work before we can say we "know it." Until we use it, it remains information. Knowledge (Stage 3) comes from applying information to our work. This is the stage at which most company training programs fail -- too often the content of company training programs never gets applied to the employee's work. To me, this means that the investment in that training is totally wasted.
• Wisdom (Stage 4), that most precious possession, comes from adding intuition and experience to knowledge.
• First, we must sort through all of the available data to find only that information that is relevant to our learning needs and for which we have a purpose.
• Once we have gathered and learned the needed information, we need to apply it to our work in order to transform it into our personal knowledge.
• This is why having a personal learning network is so important -- to provide us not only with pointers to sources of information, but to answer questions, to coach us, to reinforce our learning when we try to apply it to our work.

  • How can we create this in the Academy? The value of the PLN (which for students may be largely composed of other students) is the more or less rich source of constant, persistent CONNECTIONS that can be accessed just in time to accomplish work.
• Who should be in your personal learning network? The members of your network do not need to be people with whom you work directly. In fact, you do not even need to know the people personally. The members of your network should be people, both inside and outside of your work group and your company, who have the knowledge that you are trying to master and who are willing to share their knowledge and experience with you.
• To establish a learning network, you can ask other people in your group, or with whom you have gone through a training program, to participate in periodic discussions as you all try to implement a new way of working, to support each other and share experiences with each other. Most people are happy to help -- people generally like to talk about their own work and are honored to be asked to share their knowledge and wisdom.
• the value of knowledge increases when you share it with others.
• Building a personal learning network is requires that you not only seek to learn from others, but also that you also help others in the network learn.
• A personal learning network can be your most powerful learning tool no matter what the subject.

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• We focused on providing just-in-time resources, in the context of work situations not easily predicted, rather than longer duration, more tightly targeted and structured instructional programs.
• the screen is bigger, which makes a huge difference in how we can display informational and instructional content.
• the most important game-changer is that the iPad, and other devices to follow, are designed to be “always on,” or “always connected;” the intent being that you always have access to the Internet (of course this may not be practically true yet, but it certainly is the goal).
• the use of organization-based social networking as a mobile learning strategy.
• the idea of downloading starts to seem antiquated.
• Clearly, the platforms and devices becoming available are more flexible, more powerful, more portable, and more user-friendly. 24x7 access to content makes mLearning more convenient and valuable. New communication channels open up new opportunities to connect with coworkers and experts, anytime and anywhere. And the use of cloud computing makes virtually limitless amounts of content instantly available to virtually limitless numbers of users.

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• Consider the scoring strategy Yahoo! Answers uses to award points to its members. New users start with 100 points, the ability to ask up to five questions a day, answer up to 20 questions a day, and comment on 10 answers a day. But if users want the ability to rate other answers with a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down,” they have to earn another 150 points first. To earn those points, they could simply log in once a day for 150 days. If they choose to answer questions, however, they can earn 2 points per question, which would speed up the process. The quickest way to earn a lot of points is to provide the Best Answer for the question. When an Asker selects a Best Answer, the participant who wrote it gets 10 points, and additional points for each “thumbs up” rating from other users.
• As an early assignment, a facilitator might ask the group to vote on a question, to introduce themselves to the rest of the group, or provide a link to resources they’ve found useful in the past.
• The first threaded discussions might evolve from simple polls into exercises where you ask learners to rank choices in the order of their preference and explain the reasons for their choice. Later, you might ask participants to divide into groups (or they might naturally divide into groups on their own) to argue the pros and cons of a particular situation. You can ask specific members to pose questions to the group, submit blog entries, or edit wiki entries for accuracy.
• Scoring is a motivator because it provides users with feedback. If your learning environment doesn’t include a scoring strategy, look for ways to help the members of the community notice and appreciate one another’s contributions.
• Learning communities that sustain themselves over long periods engage in these activities naturally. Members are simply curious about one another’s opinions and know others appreciate their contributions. If learners are engaged in productive conversation without you, avoid the temptation to get caught up in the role of emcee. Ultimately, the goal is to create a learning community that sustains itself with minimal intervention from the learning designer.

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• This has expanded into the idea of a social presence where one is able to be seen as a real person in a virtual environment

• In a typical high school, learning communities are fragmented and isolated, if they even exist at all. It’s unlikely that any of us would label a typical high school classroom, with its characteristic five rows of six desks, limited access to information and conversation, a learning community. Very little interaction exists within the classroom, and interaction from sources outside the four walls of the classroom is generally non-existent-the classroom walls, in effect, are impermeable.