Journal 6: PLN's

Warlick, David (2009,March/April). Grow Your Personal Learning Network. Learning and Leading with Technology, Retrieved 4/2/2009, from http://www.iste.org/Content/NavigationMenu/Publications/LL/LLIssues/Volume3620082009/MarchAprilNo6/36612w.pdf

A PLN is a Personal Learning Network, which can be useful tool for networking with people and other online resources. There are three different types of PLN's that can be used to collaborate with people and web sources. The first PLN is called Personall Maintained Synchronous Connections. You can use this PLN to solve problems and ask questions in real time, which means you can talk to anyone in world at a certain moment just like if you were in a conversation with them at an office or a coffee place. The second type of PLN is called Personally and Socially Maintained Semisynchronous Connections. Semisynchronous basically means the participants and collaborators can get back to the questions and conversations on their own time without the concern of geography or time of day. Usually this type of PLN is used at any time rather than in the "now." The final type of PLN is called Dynamically Maintained Asynchronous Connections. The main function and tool used in this PLN is RSS Aggregator, which allows people to search a variety of quality web links from a social network of people who recommend the sites. This often eliminates a tedious google search for good links or sites, and helps collaborators grasp onto a network of social bookmarked sites.

Question 1: How can asynchronous PLN's be used in a classroom?

Answer: As a teacher it would be a great idea to have students break up into small groups and work together on a project requiring Internet research. Each group should be given a section of the project to research, and that particular group can bookmark their sources through a program like Delicious. Each group will do the same for their section of the project. For the sections the groups did not have they can use the bookmarked sites and sources the other groups have marked in order to finish their research.

Question 2: What are the advantages and disadvantages to the Personally Synchronous Maintained Connections?

Answer: One advantage is that you can talk to people all over the globe for free in an instantaneous conversational manner. This allows a variety of opinions and knowledge to be shared in the moment when a person is searching for answers. The disadvantage of this type of PLN is if you cannot talk at the same time as others. This is when you would want to move to the Semisynchronous PLN's like google docs, which does not require you be available at a specific time.