How to create a PLN: What I learned
I like how this teacher-cum-blogger, a self-professed “technology newbie” broke down the process of building a PLN into literal bite-sized pieces. It went a bit like this: “Day 1-Breakfast-create a Gmail account. Lunch-create a twitter and Facebook account. Dinner-Start a blog on blogger…” Hmmm, this was starting to sound suspiciously familiar. Perhaps we were on the same diet?
From this site I gleamed a pretty professional sounding definition of a PLN quoted from a man named David Warlick: "(A PLN) involves an individual’s topic oriented goal, a set of practices or techniques aimed at attracting or organizing a variety of relevant content sources, selected for their value, to help the owner accomplish a professional goal or personal interest."
I loved the quick, 9-slide slideshare on “How to build a PLN” which delivered an awesome new word into my lexicon: “twitterverse”. As in, I can’t believe that before last week I didn’t even exist in the twitterverse. Nor did I know that there is a whole twitterverse of free shared knowledge up for grabs on twitter!
With my interest in twitter spurred by the newest addition to my vocabulary mentioned above, I decided to check this YouTube video titled: “PRESTO: How to Build Your PLN on Twitter”. This 3 minute video was absolutely awesome for instantaneously catapulting me from a twitter “newbie” to a “reporter” and helped me envision my embarking to the next step, “SME” in which one graduates from tweeting events and leaving comments to tweeting ideas and answering questions.
All in all, the similar thread I saw running through the myriad of PLN how-to pages I perused were the following key components:
-Start with a gmail account (and make sure you choose a good, professional user ID)
-Open professional twitter and Facebook accounts
-Start a blog
-Follow inspirational educators
-Get involved in the global conversation and become an inspiration yourself!
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