Understanding Professional Learning Networks (PLN)


What is PLN?




“Image Source: Teaching and Learning for Social Workers


A PLN is a professional learning network.

It is a network of individuals, a community that can help you grow personally and in your profession. One can think of it as a trusted group of “friends”, from whom you take and give back in return. This is not an idea that is new to social media or to education. But with the advent of social media, it has become particularly easy to create and belong to a PLN and this allows us a peek into the relationship between teaching and learning.

 

Authors like Dr. Trust  highly encourage educators to belong to or create a PLN in order to enhance their social, affective, cognitive and identity growth. 

While authors like Rheingold caution us about social media conversation etiquette. 

It seems to me that belonging to a PNL would greatly address the current teacher crisis and shortage existing in the educational field in addition to ensuring that the material taught and the teaching techniques used are up to date with the changes in society. 


Learning with and through the community


The ancient Greek philosopher had noticed long ago that “humans are social beings”. Meaning that we learn with the help of our community. Author Vygorsky, in his studies about how humans learn, has shown that while we are all endowed with elemental functions of attention, sensation, perception, and memory, these mental functions are developed into higher mental functions through social interactions.

Source Image: African Storybook and children

In short, educators need to continue learning through the interactions they experience in the PLNs just as children learn constantly through interactions with peers, teachers, or with others with more advanced peers.


Challenges


One of the challenges related to joining any community is the fear of doing something new and the tendency to congregate around the same people. It seems to me that by opening up our world to a PLN composed of people who are different from those we see every day and who have the same ideas as us, would enable us to change our routines and develop new neurological pathways.

Another challenge is the fear of being “bullied” on social platforms.

To combat this fear we should endeavour to be the change we would like to see in social media.


THE PERSONALITY TEST

 

“Image property of Five Factors Test”



“Image property of Leadership Skills Test”



“Image property of 16 personalitiesTest”



One of the strategies for overcoming our fear of joining PLNs is to take a personality test to better understand ourselves.

The main difficulty with these tests is they depend on candid, truthful user input. 

The test requires that you pay close attention to the answers that you select to give a correct description of your personality.

Generally, though, with age, you begin to know and understand yourself better and decide what you want to do for your own benefit and growth.

I don't think the tests I took gave an accurate description of me!! This might be because I see in me many different tendencies. It could also be that I see the definition of a leader as the ability to lead oneself and not just others.

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