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

Today, according to Siemens (2007), “learning is a network formation process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources.”

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.

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.

We need, first, to take charge of our own learning, and next, help others take charge of their own learning. We need to move beyond the idea that an education is something that is provided for us, and toward the idea that an education is something that we create for ourselves. It is time, in other words, that we change our attitude toward learning

From the advent of the web in the mid-1990s, newspaper circulation steadily declined from over 60 million to approximately 40 million (Ahrens, 2009; Newspaper Association of America, 2011).

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.

Our schools need to harness each student’s natural propensity for participating in online spaces and funnel that energy into building powerful networks for learning that are used in every class almost every day.

It means that static textbooks that are outdated the day they are printed can be replaced with up-to-date information online that is continuously refreshed and renewed.