Next week Thursday I’m giving a presentation at a teaching & learning conference. The theme of my talk is “You are not alone”. And I’d love your help in explaining the use of a Personal Learning Network (PLN) for an educator – whether you’re a teacher, librarian, manager or educational technologist.

This is the first year we’re combining our annual e-learning conference eFest with the recently established teaching & learning conference. One of the themes is the changing role of the teacher in the 21st century and us ed techies are eager to show that e-learning is all about teaching & learning, just with technology & access to the web. Of course this can be daunting, overwhelming, scary, uncomfortable, risky…. So we want to let educators new to these exciting possibilities, know that they’re not alone. That others have gone before them and are willing to help. Besides introducing the audience to various existing communities of practice out there (like Classroom2.0), I also want to introduce the Personal Learning Network concept to them.

Now I was going to introduce the PLN concept with the classic tweet-out (“Please say hi to my audience…”) and I’ll probably still do this. However, I’d like them to hear a little more from you than 140 characters. So inspired by Alan Levine’s Amazing Stories of Openness, but on a much smaller scale, this is an advanced tweet-out from me.

I’m asking you to answer the question: “What does my PLN mean to me?” and share your thoughts in a short video/animation/slidecast, about 2-3 minutes. If you work in education, I’d love to hear from you – teachers, librarians, educational technologists and managers. Feel free to answer as you will. However if you get stuck, here are some suggestions to include:

• Who you are, where you are & what you do
• How your PLN has affected your own learning?
• How your PLN has affected your practice?
• Something really neat you learned through your PLN recently
• Which tools you use in your PLN?
• How you use technology in your teaching or educational practice
• How you’re adapting your teaching or practice for the 21st century?
• Your most ‘fruitful’ connection made through your PLN
• Any words of encouragement for educators new to this 21st century, ‘techie’ way of teaching & learning

After you’ve posted your video/animation/slidecast somewhere on the web, please also embed it on the What My PLN Means – wiki here. And send me (@catspyjamasnz) a tweet to let me know – include the hashtag #mypln. That way I can thank you. Hopefully this project will go beyond my presentation, and provide us all with some additional evidence of the usefulness of a PLN for an educator.

Thanks for your help, PLN!

Update: only fair that I go first. Here’s my video about what my PLN means to me.

At the end of last year, Alec Couros led an interesting Twitter conversation about the definition of a PLN. Or a PLE. Are they interchangeable?

I was pulled into the conversation via @bookjewel, as she re-plurked Alec’s questions on Plurk. Somehow her question crystallized my thinking, and rather than responding in 140 characters, I quickly fired up PowerPoint and used its SmartArt (I’m a big fan) to create a visualization of the relationship I see between the PLE and the PLN. Alec then kindly included my graphic in his blog post. And as of this posting, it had been viewed 742 times, which makes it my most shared artefact on the web by quite a stretch. As I’ve never blogged it (it’s only ever existed on Flickr) I thought I would post it here, to re-start my own thinking about PLNs where it left off, in December 2008.

I’ve split up the technological connections (in the PLE) from the inter-personal connections (in the PLN). I think of the PLE, the environment, as the ‘hardware’ of the PLN. The PLE can exist as interrelated links, feeds and profiles on a myriad of sites, but it is nothing without the encompassing PLN of the person, their personal connections with others and their interchange of ideas to make meaning of it.

Those were my initial thoughts back then. I’m hoping to do more work on PLNs soon, by running a pilot project implementing PLNs as a staff development tool for teachers.

I’ve just transferred my blog from Edublogs to this new location. The last post on the old blog was about Twitter Mosaic. Unfortunately the mosaic was a. broken and b. hopelessly out of date. So yes I’m re-hashing an old post, but it’s for a reason.

A Twitter Mosaic is easy to create. Just type your Twitter username, choose between Twitter Followers or Twitter Friends and the site creates a mosaic out of their avatars. You can then edit it, removing those you don’t want (you may follow @BBCNews but it’s not really your friend, is it?) and your mosaic is done.

You can copy & past the code to embed it in a website. But of course, the clever people at Twitter Mosaic are also willing to print it on cards, mugs, bags, mouse pads and t-shirts.

I will admit I am sorely tempted by the mug so I could take my PLN to morning tea with me. (Obviously with only my tablet pc and my iPhone, I don’t come across as nearly geeky enough in the staff room). However last time I checked it came down to NZ$60 incl shipping. Apparently printing anything Twitter-related on anything, is still good business.

Get your twitter mosaic here.