Personal Learning Network
I really liked the article about Personal Learning Network (PLN). As it said; it is not something new; I used to have PLN group (face-to-face meetings) during high school/College days to exchange information and share knowledge about the curricula (Unfortunately internet was not available in my country at that time). Later on after my graduation from engineering college, I used to have a professional PLN group (face-to-face/email) with my colleagues/friends working within same field to share knowledge (unfortunately social networks/blogs/.. was not there yet). Nowadays; I have many PLN groups through social networking (Facebook/twitter/LinkedIn/..), majority of these PLN groups are mixed with professional knowledge and personal-social news/updates (LinkedIn is the only exception; it is really a pure network for professional profiles).
These PLN group really helped me in my professional life; for example, I had many situations where I faced a new technical problem to me and the PLN group was the source of solution to my technical problem; another example, in teaching-PLN groups helped me a lot not only to understand some concepts in depths but also introduced a better way to present these concepts to my students, it really provides me with helpful resources (like freeware simulation tools, useful resources, videos,….).
I have some good ideas about extending PLN groups; for example by having a group within HCT organization to exchange/share our experience/knowledge about teaching environment/classroom experiences/ …; we can have another PLN group within Higher education in UAE (HCT, UAE-U, Zayed-U, ..) for the same.
I consider my online post graduate is another PLN group for me where we use new technologies such as Google Docs, Google+, Prezi, Blogs, and LMS as tools that help us sharing, developing, and constructing knowledge.
Finally; I do believe that PLN groups is our way forward to build our network society in 21st century. Also I do like the Open Educational Resources (OER); I believe this the way forward for our future educational system.
Regarding Team Project:
I am teaching Computer Hardware & Network course which I will use some digital narritive technology with it.
Regarding Team Project:
I am teaching Computer Hardware & Network course which I will use some digital narritive technology with it.
Hi Ahmed,
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading your post and I'm impressed by your ability to maintain PLNs. For me, it has become increasingly difficult to keep up with all the requirements of maintaining the large number of PLNs my life seems to require. For example, on LinkedIn, I have quite an extensive network but have very little time to communicate with people in my network to develop the relationships that will really make that network useful to me.
I really feel that you have to give of yourself to the network in order to gain something from the network. 'Pay it forward' is a good phrase to describe this. But it's difficult to find the time to do it properly.
Regards,
Dean
Yes Dean, it is true.
ReplyDeleteI face the same issue in maintain PLN groups, I guess the challenge is in balancing between these PLN groups according to our needs.
Ahmed
In my younger days, I used to chat mostly with Yahoo Messenger (formerly Yahoo Pager), though I also occasionally employed mIRC, Microsoft Chat, and AOL Instant Messenger.
ReplyDeleteWhile I often just stuck with text chat because of my then slower Internet connection, I also sometimes did voice and video chat.... I eventually had an EB (eyeball of face-to-face contact) with a number of my chatmates, and I still maintain contact with many of them these days through e-mail and Facebook (though not much through SMS or phone calls)
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On a different note, we have had HCT-wide course teams for years now. Recently, there has been a push for greater collaboration, which had led to our collaboration site for the CIS (IT) department:
http://portal.hct.ac.ae/sites/acs/it/Programs/ITCourseCollaboration/Pages/default.aspx
Of course, there were varying levels of collaboration and communication among different course teams.