Establishing a Professional Learning Network

A couple weeks ago we had a speaker in our class, Dennis Culver, a graduate assistant from the Center for Technology in Learning and Teaching at Iowa State University.  His main subject was Social Media as a way to create a professional network.  He talked about ways to connect, collaborate, and contribute to the subjects that we are interested on. 

Social media, for example Facebook, Linkedin, or Twitter, can be used to make some professional connections and to discuss important issues in our careers.  One of the subjects was the way that people use these sites.  If people use these sites just to gossip, it is just like a gossiping magazine, it goes nowhere.  But it can be used in a productive way, in a way that we learn and benefit ourselves. 

I was aware of most of the sites he mentioned, and in most of them I do have an account, but how do we put them together? How can we follow everything that happens in each of them?  I found out that there are some “Social Media Management” websites, this was news to me. Under this management, we can schedule post for different social sites, or manage unlimited social networks and profiles under one interface.  I like this idea, and for me, it is a solution to incorporate the ones I follow and to form groups and lists, it is a time saving. 

What is your goal in these social media?  What role will you take?  I am more a passive follower, I learn by reading and following what other people post.   But I am willing to explore new roles and to express myself.  There are also many Professional Online Networks, for example, Adobe, Microsoft and Google, and I would like to start expanding and knowing about these other professional organizations.

Something new to me was “social Bookmarking” which is a “centralized online service which enables users to add, annotate, edit and share bookmarks of web documents”.  Some of the most popular are Diigo, Delicious, or Pinterest.  I have to research more on this subject.

Another subject he talked about was Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as a recent development in online learning and been able to take university online courses for free.  There are thousands of students within the same classroom.   This was new to me, and I think a way to open new possibilities for many people who cannot take the classes in person.