Building Your PLN and Microblogging

Retrieved from: http://www.danpontefract.com

This week we explore how to expand your Personal Learning Network (PLN) and the use of microblogging.  We've already explored blogging in its typical form which consists of posts on blogs like the one you are reading right now but what is microblogging? Wikipedia defines microblogging  as a blog post that is much more limited in size. Microblogs involves the exchange of small elements of content such as short sentences, images, or video links.

Twitter, which is probably the most popular tool for this purpose, is the tool that I set out to explore for this purpose.  In his video available here, Brad Flickinger suggested that you should follow at least ten people on twitter to build a decent PLN and gives good advice on how to pick quality sources.  The only problem is that I haven't found very many people to follow that don't either; post tweets that are irrelevant to education or that are doing what is known as hyperblogging which means that they bombard you with so much information that you can't possibly keep up.  Because I was determined to follow ten members I looked past some of these filters and added the ones I felt shared the most interesting information.  I also decided to follow the #edtech list since everyone who posts something with that hashtag should pertain to education technology.  Maybe following that list will also allow me to find good members to follow.

I must be honest and say that the only reason I gave it to the little blue bird they call twitter was because many of the sites I visited regularly had contests they ran using twitter and because some companies release promotions there first.  I don't follow it regularly and my experience going back to it in a bid to expand my PLN reminded me exactly why I was never a big fan in the first place.  The rate at which people post tweets makes me wonder if that is the sole reason for their existence.   Most share good information but if I'm following ten of you who post a tweet every hour or two that means that I'm being sent 10 tweets an hour for 12hours (assuming most people tweet more during business hours) that means that I receive a minimum of 120 tweets a day.  ignore it for a couple of days and you can imagine how quickly that number rapidly grows into an unmanageable amount of tweets to even scan through for what could be good information.  Worse yet is when allot of it is good information. 

I knew that the process of building my PLN would involve the discovery and use of many different tools but I now accept the fact that they won't all suit my style or meet my needs.  So far I've learned that curating content and using twitter are NOT approaches that I am drawn too.  It doesn't mean that I'll give up on them, it just means that I may need to revise what I want or expect out of such tools.  I've followed some of my coursemates as suggested and upon reflecting about the my PLN I realized two things; one being that what I want from a PLN is interactions with people I've come to know and appreciate instead of just being bombarded with information by someone I don't even know. The second was that, in a real work environment, it takes times to make good contacts and network with reliable people that you can trust and who's opinions you truly respect.  That being said, it will take time for me build a quality PLN but as this lifelong building process continues, I will build a solid network of people that make the experience an enriching and rewarding one.  It needs to start somewhere but instead of going on a wild goose chase on twitter to find members who post good quality tweets, I would advise you to start closer and add some of your favorite teachers and go from there.  You'd rather start small and receive a minimal amount of good information that start big and get discouraged like I did but hopefully you can learn from my experience.  Start small and remember that networking doesn't happen overnight. 

To conclude I'd like to leave you with an interesting post that I first saw on my Feedly but that has also been shared by many on the twittersphere.  It's about the use of colors and the meanings behind them.  We've all seen slideshows where attention to the use of colors was well thought out or very poorly implemented from a visual standpoint. Have you ever considered what messages the colors in your slide might be conveying?

Retrieved from; Free Technology for Teachers

All the best with your PLN!  Feel free to share some of the people YOU follow as part of your network.  

Mat