Personal Learning Networks: Using the Power of Connections to Transform Education

“learning networks”? We mean the rich set of connections each of us can make to people in both our online and offline worlds who can help us with our learning pursuits.

When asked to design the school of the future, “communication tools” was the number one student pick, according to Speak Up 2009, a survey of almost 300,000 K–12 students (Project Tomorrow, 2010).

The definition of educational leader needs to shift from the person with the title to the person with the vision.

prepared. We have to introduce our kids to a whole new method of learning that is less about memorizing and “doing their own work” and more about content creation and collaborating with others, and doing so in the context of their passions.

In contrast, only 27 percent of nearly 40,000 teachers surveyed thought that collaboration tools such as blogs, social networking sites, or wikis have a role in schools, and only 25 percent of future teachers responded that their preparation courses are teaching them how to use learning network tools to facilitate collaboration between students.

They tried to take the same content, produced by the same people, in the same ways, and get subscribers and advertisers to pay for it on the web in a traditional model.

We have to ask our teachers to learn in different ways than how they learned in their high schools and colleges in order to leverage the power of modern networks, not only for their own personal learning but to better deliver these new skills and literacies to the students in their classrooms.

Knowledge itself is moving from the individual to the individual and his contacts”

Learning networks are very different both in form and purpose in that we instead connect with people we don’t already know—helpful strangers who share our passion for a particular topic.