Week 5 Report

Hello everyone,

this week the major topic was microblogging and building our PLN. If you’ve been following my blog you should be familiar with the term PLN (Personal Learning Network). PLN is a two way process in which you enhance your own learning as well as contribute to your network so others can learn from you (Dickens, 2012). It is such an amazing thing to be apart of as you can interact with people all around the globe, and though you may not meet many of the people you interact with you can still learn from them. Personal Learning Networks are becoming more established in a number of professional fields.  Like myself, some of you might be wondering how do I start building my PLN? Well, first you have to think about what you can offer (knowledge, insight and ideas). Secondly you must consider what it is you want to learn (Dickens, 2012).

To get started on creating your own PLN you can use a number of different web tools such as facebook, blogger, google reader and twitter. The tool I explored this week was Twitter. Almost everyone has heard of twitter, it has become a worldwide phenomenon over the past few years. Though it is extremely popular, prior to this week I’ve never set up a Twitter account, so the entire process was new to me. Through Twitter how can we set up our PLN? You must find people, whom you admire or think you can learn from, after searching for them simply follow them on Twitter (Weisgerber, 2011). It seems easy enough right? I found that while setting up my account it was extremely easy to navigate and I quickly got the hang of it. For those of you interested you can see my twitter account here.

Image retrieved from: http://projecttgm.com/2013/04/3-reasons-i-may-or-may-not-follow-you-on-twitter/twitter-followers/

Prior to this session, I didn’t really see any value in having a Twitter account. I thought why is it important to follow people who are simply going to tweet about their day or how they’re feeling. After having completed this session I learnt that Twitter is so much more than reporting on your daily life events. Twitter is extremely useful in sharing and learning about new knowledge as well as contributing your own thoughts. I’ve followed a number of  people in the field of psychology. This will be beneficial to my education as I can read about the latest developments in the field. I can learn from Psychology educators from various Universities even though I will never actually attend their classes. Twitter is such a great tool to stay connected and build your PLN.

Twitter is yet another tool that I can add to my PLE. Throughout the course I’ve been adding a number of online tools to my PLE that will be useful to me in both my education and future career. I would classify twitter as both a social and research tool. It’s a social tool for obvious reasons; it allows you to connect with friends, family, educators and many others. You can actively engage in conversations with people from all around the globe. It could also be considered a research tool as you can search for any topic using hash tags and be shown a list of tweets that contains information on that particular topic. Many users provide links to various sites in which you can learn additional information.

To conclude this post I’d like to share a link to an article I came across on my Feedly. The article is titled Flappy Bird Can Make You A Better Blogger. For those of you who have never heard of flappy bird, it is a highly addicting game you can get on your phone or tablet. Who would have thought that a game like this could actually contribute to our blogging skills? It’s kind of neat!

Take care,

Emily

References: 

Dickens, S. (2012, Feb.). How to Build Your PLN (Seth Dickens). Retrieved from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A667plNCzwA&feature=youtu.be

Weisgerber, C. (2011). Empowering students through personal learning networks. Retrieved from: http://www.slideshare.net/corinnew/empowering-students-through-learning-networks