ArtEd Online
Building Your Personal
Learning Network, Part 1
Craig Roland
The latest catchphrase to
spread throughout the online
educational community is
“personal learning network,”
which refers to a collection of people
and resources you can consult to
learn something or to get answers
to your questions. Building learning
connections is not a new practice
for teachers. From the time we enter
the classroom, we gather useful curriculum resources, and periodically
call on colleagues for advice, read
educational journals, and attend
professional conferences in order
to enhance our understanding of
pedagogy and the subjects we teach.
With the aid of some online tools,
you can now expand your existing
learning network to include people
and resources from all over the world.
Here are two tips to get you started—
additional suggestions will follow in
the May/June 2009 issue of
SchoolArts:
Tip 1: Join the Twitter Community
In my December 2008 column, I
described several social networks that
you can join to communicate and
interact with other art educators from
around the globe. Another option is to
join the Twitter community (twitter.
com). Twitter allows users to send and
read messages that are limited to 140
characters. The content of these short
missives, known as “tweets,” offer a
mixture of the mundane and the useful. They may include anything from
publicity announcements to questions posed by the author, from links
to websites, to descriptions of what
someone is doing at the moment.
After signing up for an account
and customizing your profile, you
need to create a network of people
that you will follow and that will follow you. Start by inviting colleagues
and friends to join Twitter. Try
searching Twitter’s public timeline
using keywords that describe you
and your interests (e.g., “art teacher”
or “NBCT”). Browse through the
results and read the authors’ profiles
of messages that attract your attention. If you find someone you’d like to
follow, click on the “follow” button
under his or her icon. Also, look at
the people they follow for more possibilities. Lastly, see Twitter4Teachers
( twitter4teachers.pbwiki.com) for a
list of teachers on Twitter by grade
level and subject area. Add your name
to that list. Conversely, the best way
to get people to follow you is to use
Twitter regularly to reflect on what’s
happening in your classroom and to
raise issues or share resources that
might interest other teachers. For
tips on getting started with Twitter, read Darren Rowse’s “ 10 Easy
Steps for Twitter Beginners” (snipurl.
com/6w6o8).
Tip 2: Set up a Social
Bookmarking Account
Social bookmarking is a variation
of the popular practice of saving and
organizing links to Web pages (
sometimes called “favorites”) that you
want to remember and return to at a
later date. In a social bookmarking
system, links are usually shared with
selected people through groups or
networks. Since your links are stored
online rather than on your computer,
they are available through any computer connected to the Internet.
Social bookmarking sites encourage users to organize their collections
of bookmarks with tags, which are
keywords associated with the content of a linked page. Other features
available through some social bookmarking services include subscription feeds that inform you when new
bookmarks have been added to your
network or group, plus the ability to
highlight and annotate bookmarked
pages.
Two social bookmarking services
popular among teachers are Delicious
( delicious.com) and Diigo (diigo.
com), which offers educator accounts
with features intended to serve the
needs of K– 12 teachers. To get started
with either service, you need to first
register for an account and install
special bookmaking buttons in your
Web browser. To learn more, watch
Common Craft’s “Social Bookmarking in Plain English” video (snipurl.
com/6w6pm).
Craig Roland is an associate professor of art
education in the School of Art and Art History at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. He is the author of The Art
Teacher’s Guide to the Internet (Davis Publications, 2005). rolandc@ufl.edu
