A Personal Learning Network or Personal Learning Environment is a term used to describe a way of organizing and accessing information that helps you do your work. It’s usually applied to those people who work in an information-rich environment where it’s important to keep up with the latest research and where one might be contributing research to the field. Higher Education fits into this perfectly! Creating a PLN/PLE often involves using a variety of online and offline tools that allow you to easily find the information you need. But it’s not just about gathering and accessing information; it’s also about connecting to people and finding ways to discover information through them. In this workshop, we will talk about common ways to create PLN/PLE’s more generally, but we will also look specifically at your current workflow and learn about tools that may help facilitate some aspect of your work that is causing you difficulty. Each participant should come out of the workshop with at least one implementation of a PLN tool. In addition, we will extrapolate from PLE’s for faculty work to creating PLE-like environments for students and how to build classes that help students create their own PLN/PLE’s.
If Any Moron Can Write a Blog, Then All Blogs are Written by Morons, Right?
The title of my talk is one phrasing of the general strategy employed by many faculty (and increasingly, students) when it comes to approaching material on the open web. Faculty not only discourage, but often outright forbid the use of blogs, wikis, or other online resources that are not peer-reviewed. Doing so does a disservice to our students and doesn’t encourage the kind of critical thinking and analytical strategies necessary for our students (and us) to participate in our hyper-mediated society. Already, peer-reviewed material appears right alongside non-peer-reviewed material on the web. This will only increase in the future as scholarly work comes out from behind paywalls into the public web. And this will be a good thing. But will our students be ready to sort through multiple channels and sources of information and make informed decisions? In this talk, I will take apart the logic of the title. In the process, I will explore how a blog can be just as good a resource as a peer-reviewed article, how using Wikipedia teaches valuable lessons about cooperation and information creation and perceptions, how having students actively contribute to these resources teaches more than writing an academic paper, and what happens when students leave college and no longer have access to peer-reviewed materials. I want to ask the question, “Now what?” in the context of teaching and learning in a world where everything is on the web and everyone has access to it and to think beyond what happens while students are in our classrooms to the time when they work, play, and vote alongside us. How can we structure our teaching to help create the informed citizenry of the future?
Laura Blankenship
Plenary Presentation
Thursday, May 14, 9:00-10:15
If Any Moron Can Write a Blog, Then All Blogs are Written by Morons, Right?
Workshop
Wednesday, May 13, 3:30-4:45
Creating a Personal Learning Network for Yourself and for Your Students
Bio
Dr. Blankenship has been working in higher education since the early 1990s and is currently founder and president of Emerging Technologies Consulting.
She began using technology in her teaching in 1997 and in 2003, made helping other faculty use technology for teaching and learning her full-time job. This past fall, she left full-time work to go out on her own and broaden the scope of what she does. While she still feels passionate about integrating technology into educational environments, she also wants to work with communities and businesses to use social software effectively.