The idea of a Personal Learning Environment is also simple: it’s the place/way one organizes the input from the PLN. This would include tools, including social networking tools, RSS aggregation, and even things I write in a notebook.

The first major reference I can find to a PLN is dated 1998, from Dan Tobin in a business context: Building Your Personal Learning Network. Now we have articles (like this one by Miguel Guhlin Build Your PLN) and blogs and even an entire class (PLENK) based on the idea.

It begins to sound like a product, something everyone should get or have. Or a structure that we should build. And within the context of this class, many students are doing that, building a PLN using the tools that are suggested, especially Twitter.

I see PLNs as more organic, not only because they are ever-changing but because they grow over time. And sometimes a very long time. Longer than this class will last, for sure.

Vanessa writes, “developing a PLN takes time and that I have already completed a number of the necessary tasks that will help me on my way to establishing connections on Twitter such as creating an account, learning to follow, watching and listening, retweeting, tagging tweets, etc”.

Time is crucial. You can start growing your own, but throwing one together could end in disappointment and disillusionment.

This is where you get comments like “I just don’t see the point of Twitter” and Jud’s wonderfully honest and insightful post that includes “I don’t understand the appeal of using a blog, twitter or other forms of social media for much of anything”.

It isn’t about the tools, but where the people are with whom you want to connect. Many people join Facebook, not because they want to be in Facebook, but because their family or friends are already there and they want to interact. I’m in Twitter because that’s where the ed tech people are, and I enjoy the challenge of writing in 140 character spurts because I’m perverse. I read blogs because that’s where the emergent thinking is published, and books because that’s where the polished, extended thinking is published. I belong to a listserv because they have one for community college history instructors, and I want to interact with them. I use Google Reader because I prefer to scan multiple blog posts instead of going to each blog.

I’m really glad I started doing this first, before everyone started calling it a PLN. The name itself sounds technical, and therefore difficult. The fact that people are writing research articles and holding classes about it makes it seem even harder and more distant from ordinary, daily activity.

That’s a shame. Because really, it’s pretty simple.

In a “regular” class, I’d be a student and Dr Couros would be the expert. I would write a paper, and he would critique it. Perhaps he’d tell me an argument I made wasn’t fair, or he’d point me to another source. Peers would review it, and give me feedback. I could do a rewrite until the product has some finish to it. I could have the same kind of certainty as when I wrote a history paper in college. I defy anyone to read my masters’ thesis on medieval and early modern woollen technology and tell me I missed something. (Indeed, I defy anyone to read it, period.)

But a 12th century fulling mill is not going to come along and comment on how I portrayed its character or ideas in my thesis.

Blogging is designed to be “draft like” — the ideas posted are supposedly understood to be unfinished. But how brave can we be posting such unfinished ideas, where those whose work we critique can critique our work immediately? Doesn’t this extreme openness restrict the “draft” nature of blogging, the feeling that it’s OK to be wrong?

It’s like writing a paper criticizing the Communist Manifesto and having Karl Marx leave a comment saying, “Well, Lisa, what I really meant by “working men” was…”

And unlike Marx, the people whose ideas I criticize are all educational technology media types. They have Google Alerts and other devices set up to track every time someone mentions them. In 2008, as part of the Connectivism class, I blogged a critique of an article by Barry Wellman, whose work I thought had moral implications. He emailed me directly, and the very few exchanges we had were not very pleasant. He’ll probably know now that I mentioned him again — oh goodie.

If someone with my experience is freaking out, what must less experienced bloggers feel? I realize that Dr Couros himself thrusts us into the limelight via Twitter. That doesn’t normally happen — I’ve been blogging for years on my own blog, announcing my own posts myself in Twitter and linking them into Facebook. Only rarely has anyone whose ideas I’ve analyzed so much as stopped by.

Oh, I realize the benefits — don’t get me wrong. A 12th century fulling mill would not be able to give me good advice, help my thinking or point be toward better resources. I know it’s helping me learn.

But this is getting pretty damn weird. Learning in the open has never been something I feared before, but now…

A number of people in the room picked up on “Persevance toward deep thought”, and that idea is striking. Online many of us do something, then just move on. For me, it is a strength in that I am exposed to a great many things. But it is also a weakness in that I tend to drop my ideas, and when I come back to them sometimes I don’t realize that I am revising and unpacking. I often begin writing a post or a note on paper, then realize I’ve already written it. Lying around the house right now, in a couple of different Moleskin books and several sheets of my favorite lined notepad paper are writings exploring my doubts about the value of being connected. They pull together in different forms (such as my last post), but don’t seem to reach a clear point. And if they do, I’ll move on.

Since one of my main complaints with today’s technological world is that there is little need, opportunity or motive for deep thought, I really ought to do a better job of Perseverance.

“Desire to be transparent in thinking” goes beyond this into what it means to be open. This is one of my main goals for the course. “Alacrity to share and contribute” is an objective on the way to that goal. Another weakness for me is apparent in the idea of co-learning. I’m still not sure whether I’ve drunk the Koolaid on that one. Obviously I believe in classes, and if we all learn together that’s great, and if we reference each other while we’re doing it that’s great too. But are we co-learning?

Co-creating, sure. Co-leading, absolutely. Some of the best workshops I’ve ever given have been with a marvelous colleague, Jim Sullivan, at my side. At times it’s like George and Gracie. We play off each other. We lead together all the time.

The Elluminate session was enriched for me by something that wasn’t on the list explicitly: bringing others to learn beside you. When our session started, another colleague of mine (from my college) IM’d me. I am being evaluated this semester, and she was looking at my online class. When she popped in to comment on an exercise she liked, I invited her to join our Eluminate session. It had just started, and this colleague, Pilar Hernández, has given many workshops for our professional development program on building community in online classes. Getting her perspective on Nussbaum-Beach’s points, at the moment they were being made, was enlightening. Is that what’s meant by co-learning?

I would like to track the class’s blogs so I can see everything, without having to go to each individual blog and click on each comments link for each post. I also want to track my own comments.

No one could accuse me of having a Pollyanna-ish idea of progress, but it seems we are still in 2004 with the RSS readers and aggregation technologies available to us.

I can, and do, use Google Reader. I can subscribe to the feeds from everyone’s blogs and put them there. I can put them all in a folder, which I have done (later Dr Couros got us the bundle), so I can read all the posts and scroll.

But the feeds are of two types: Posts and Comments. These are separate feeds for each blog. I spent this morning going through and pasting the feeds for everyone’s Comments into a separate folder. If I put them in the same folder with the posts, it made a mess, since you can only organize by newest, oldest, or “magic” (I hate it when they get cute – where’s my wand?).

[Some blogs didn’t have a comments feed visible, so I had to figure out to put “comments/feed” or “feed/comments” to adapt their post feed.

I used to be the type of person to put everything in files and clear my desktop (you know, a real desktop, the kind with old-fashioned papers and pens on it). Since getting hooked into the internet (think Borg) I now think laterally, and have papers spread out all over my desk, and a zillion “files” (objects) scattered on my virtual desktop (think Nicholas Carr). I have to search now to find particular emails in Gmail, and particular files on my computer because my personal filing system has failed. I need Desktop Computer 3.0 to happen NOW.

So why are the aggregators so behind?

For keeping track of my own comments (so I can have some record of what the heck I’m thinking), I had tried Co.mments (which I used, badly, for CCK08), but I went back to it and it’s gone. I’m trying Cocomment, but its Firefox extension causes crashes and it’s horrible slow.

Please, tell me I’m the one behind and I’m missing an easier way to have everyone’s posts, followed by the comments they received, all nicely open and nested on one scrollable screen?

The publicness that the Internet now allows people to have is mistakenly believed to mean trying to get the broadest possible audience. But in effect people are trying to reach like-minded people, in order to belong to a community. There has been a tremendous increase in the amount of material that is available to the public, not really intended for the public, but instead for the emerging communities.

Online communication has challenged our ideas of what a community can be. Social media allow people to relate to groups of people who live beyond the borders of location and time in the very same way that print once allowed information to be free from the constraints of location.

Social media thus redefine what local interaction is and remove the constraints we earlier had on community building.

The view of online as a separate space, a “virtual” space or “cyberspace” is an unfortunate example of a misleading metaphor that makes it hard to understand what is going on today. Our social media tools are no more alternatives to real life than books; they are very much part of it – making life more meaningful.

The web was not created as a whole entity, but as little communities trying to form and talk to each other. This class is one of those, what Rick Schwier called a formal learning community.

One of the things our community is discussing is why we blog, why we participate in this. I responded to Daniel’s comment [really, that's so cool] on Shawna’s post about this (in itself a community act), agreeing that some blog more for reflection, others more for feedback. For those who blog in order to receive feedback, they’re likely looking for feedback from a particular community, or type of person.

If we persist in looking at the web as a space (and that’s my internal metaphor) we need to see the villages as being somewhat isolated from each other, with footpaths connecting them rather than highways. These communities form of similar people with similar interests — all the online discussion boards I was part of in the 1990s were focused on a topic (organic gardening, for example). We were hyperlinked then. We could connect to any other community, object, or item on the web. But we didn’t. That’s not why we were there.

The community we have in this class is created by our instructor, whose own vast connections have been formed by years of hooking up smaller connections. We have been handed wholesale big chunks of Dr Couros’ community, in the form of big bundles in Reader and Twitter. We’ll belong to this community for this class. Will it persist? should it?

In a previous online class I took, the CCK 2008 massive open online class in 2008 (that’s about 10 years ago in internet years), a community was created of hundreds of people. The object at the center was connectivist learning theory. From those connections, I added only three people to my Personal Learning Network, and one was the instructor. Likely that says more about me than those hundreds of people! But many I think would agree that it’s easier to participate in a meaningful way in a smaller community.

I have been blogging since January 2007, yet few of the people in my “real world” community at the college know I blog, care that I blog, or would ever read my blog. It wasn’t about opening my ideas to the whole web, but rather making them available for any who were interested. I prefer connecting with individuals, not groups, and I can only get my head around a certain number of individuals at one time (just ask my students, whose sheer number – 200 per semester – I find difficult to grasp as a collection of individuals).

Perhaps true community, like true democracy (many have argued), rests in smaller groups of people, even on the web.

As the video continued, talking about how there’s too much information, I worked on reducing the information from the video into a form I could more easily access later. In one place, I put the sources of images being shown on the right-hand side, like a column. In another, I used brackets to indicate an author (Jason Lanier) whose ideas dovetailed with the speaker in the clip (Clay Shirky), especially because these two don’t, in my understanding, usually agree. At the same time, I was noting the style of the video itself (that words filled the screen to express information overload, for example).

Paper and pencil was the only way I could efficiently do this while I watched. It was, as would be supported by Rick Schwier‘s presentation last night, the right technology for the job.  Or at least, the right technology for the job if the job was being done by me.

What about the content of the video? That’s not only on the paper, but the paper expresses some of the ideas in the video about the Semantic Web, that the links between the information have their own meaning, and that corraling this meaning is its own task.

What he showed were people recording themselves on webcams as if they were in confessional, after being nervous due to “context collapse”, because they were talking to a camera, and by extension an unknown audience. It made me wonder whether the effect might be different if someone were manning the camera, filming these people. Now, in our case for this class, we created videos, but had an idea who we were creating them for: our classmates (though others may view, of course). As I was filming, I wasn’t in a confessional, I was talking to my colleagues.

I noticed the second and third parts there was emotional music added to the clips. We watched people in real life giving free hugs in a mall, then MadV. Like Jennifer Hall, I thought this was interesting. But Jennifer became more optimistic as she watched, and liked MadV having people hold up their hands with positive messages written on them. I noticed that MadV him/herself had “One World” on his hand, and the others seemed to follow suit with messages of peace and love. Would our reaction be different if he had a less positive message, and others followed suit?

Angela Byrnes wrote on her blog, “We are all connected and I think social media can be used as a tool to help make the connections authentic and in the process, as we learn from each other, we learn more about ourselves!” I very much agree — social media CAN do this. But I was not convinced that it in any way tips the scales toward good. I still see the narcissism, the intense focus on self and getting oneself noticed.

So what I learned was that I have to read Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, and that I felt somewhat manipulated at the end — I was supposed to feel that all this online connection was positive. I tend to react against such manipulation, I’m afraid, which colored my response.

I also watched A Portal to Media Literacy. I got far more out of this lecture in terms of perspective and concrete techniques I can use, although in some ways it seemed like an extension of the argument (it’s a mistake, I think, not to see these as arguments) presented in A Vision of Students Today from 2007.

As implied by my post on the Wiley/Hilton article, I do not see the traditional classroom and web-based learning as opposites, nor do I think either needs elimination. The claim is false that if students had access to the web or their cell phone in class they’d be able to quickly look up a factual answer — I’ve tried it in class. But Wesch is correct that the issue is “How can we create students who can create meaningful connections?” That isn’t about venue or format — it’s about goals.

As Danielle Stinson put it on her blog:

While they are willing to spend hours talking over their Playstations, Skyping, BBMing and texting, posting to YouTube, communicating on Facebook etc., once you try to take their classrooms to these environments they become uncomfortable.

So how and why and where do we want them to use these for learning, and how can we help if we think it’s a valuable thing to do? (Which I do, of course.)

From a professional development standpoint, getting teachers past their fear is crucial (see Dianna’s post on the effect of this lecture on her fear and doubts). Wesch’s idea that there are no digital natives is helpful:

Wesch’s own class examples were inspiring to me — I came out of the video with a whole new idea for my final project as a design for a new class, and a feeling that a No More Lecturing decision I made earlier this week was wrong. Students need to be taught skills; we can’t assume them. So yesterday I printed out Cornell notes forms and instructions, and I taught my students to take notes before my lecture, reviewing them afterward. Not high tech, not online, but useful immediately.

When Wesch acts like an anthropologist, I have no trouble — it’s when he becomes an apologist that he loses me. The implications that web connectivity can save the world, and the implication that student engagement means academic quality, just aren’t supported by research. But advice for leveraging a social tool, and descriptions of the online world we live in, were really worthwhile for me.

This is an issue with using blogs as a communication tool. I find it difficult to “converse” on a blog. A blog is ones own space, and others come to visit. They leave a comment, like a calling card in Victorian times. But if the subject is complex, it’s hard to have a meaningful conversation about it using blog replies.

Dr Couros had asked me in a comment a few days ago whether I thought the class needed a forum, a discussion board where we could “converse”, in addition to the more distributed conversation taking place through blogs and the backchannel communication in our synchronous Elluminate sessions. I did think it would fill a gap, and we looked for some good software/sites to do this. I watched Alec work with his network and even helped test some things myself, but we haven’t yet found a good forum. Some looked bad, some had security problems, etc.

But under our discontent was a vision of a place where we could discuss things in depth without too much hierarchical control. To get away from the problem of one person controlling the blog, a forum would have to let anyone be an author, to start any subject. Then it should be possible to see all reponses together, and to have responses nested several layers deep. Otherwise, one is just making a more open blog, where topics look determined.

But Dianna’s post got me thinking that it’s not just a blog problem. There is a tendency even in forums to force closure and move on. New threads appear at the top, making those that drop below appear finished, or at least less desirable. It helps to make each topic contain one central idea, but even then the linear nature of forum design forces the mind to work a certain way. The tendency is to “move on”, as if by lingering on the topics down below one is somehow impeding progress.

Both blogs and forums, then, can have that tendency to cause people to move on before subjects been more fully engaged. I think now that this tendency is caused in great part by the design of blogs and forums.

Are there alternatives? Are there web-based ways to have less linear conversations where the hierarchies can be subverted more effectively?

After applying for admission to community college (which is open to all with a high school diploma and many without) and paying fees (a nominal $26/unit as subsidized by the state), Jay makes his way to a classroom of no more than 45 students. The professor sometimes lectures, and sometimes has students work in groups. Materials used inside class are often analog (textbooks and notetaking) but outside class digital resources (available via extensive library databases) are encouraged. Small class size ensures that Jay has opportunities to meet fellow students, some of whom he connects with outside class on Facebook and through text messaging.

When Jay is not in class, he tends to lose focus on school. Instead, when he gets on the computer to do today’s research for a paper on Rousseau’s “Social Contract”, Jay finds himself surfing the net, watching YouTube videos of skateboarders (he’s even posted a few himself, being a very good skateboarder — one of his friends has a digital videocam) and reading manga e-books from Japan. At the same time, he stays continually connected to his friends through a Gmail chat window, Facebook, and text messaging on his cell phone. He finds it hard to focus on research or textbook reading (also required for the Rousseau paper, to provide context), instead seeking out information that is personal to interests he already has.

Jay thinks of himself as a creative person, but spends most of his spare cash on consumer goods, such as ringtones for his phone. He thinks of education as something to get through so he can get a job that makes enough money to buy more stuff. He’s digital and connected. The only time he isn’t is at his job as a barista, where he’s too busy to text, or in the classroom, where the tethered environment encourages him to focus on a particular subject. Surprisingly, it is here, in the more closed environment, where Jay has the best chance to learn about a world more open than on the one in which he has isolated himslef.

If he set himself to the task, Jay could learn habits of mind that would enable him to think critically about the world around him, analyze sources of information for veracity and usefulness, and develop a moral and ethical system. The opportunities are there in the paper where he may select his own topic in philosophy class, the essay where he is asked to analyze a set of historical resources, and the group project he was put in charge of in science lab. He is not aware of these opportunities because it is easier to see school, which he thinks of as artificial compared to his own reality, as a hoop to jump through rather than an opportunity for internal growth. Such growth could disconnect him from his preferred set of friends, and who cares about Rousseau, who lived so long ago, anyway?

Jay copies and pastes a line from Wikipedia’s page on Rousseau into his report (“Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains”), unaware of any irony.