{"id":1360,"date":"2010-07-26T16:45:48","date_gmt":"2010-07-26T22:45:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/?p=1360"},"modified":"2010-08-06T07:49:26","modified_gmt":"2010-08-06T13:49:26","slug":"backlash-whiplash-should-we-dump-the-term-pln","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/backlash-whiplash-should-we-dump-the-term-pln\/","title":{"rendered":"Backlash whiplash: should we dump the term “PLN”?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Flickr photo by merry heart. CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0<\/p><\/div>\n

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Responding to Alan Levine’s post<\/a> (be sure to check out his links and the comment stream):<\/p>\n

If the phrase “personal learning network,” or “PLN” (guess that makes me Dr. Evil), has really become CLICHE then I’m happy to drop the term. But I don’t think it has, or should. I’ll take the words in order.<\/p>\n

Why does it matter that it’s personal? Because for many people, the only learning network they think about is school, and school is typically not very personal–at least, it’s not something we feel we should be personally responsible for constructing for ourselves. Educators make our schools for us, and we go there to consume an education, work hard, get good grades, get our degrees. Yet I’d say that the deepest engagement with education comes only when we act as if we really are bringing the learning network into being, ourselves, every day–just as every course should write itself into being. So “personal” implies “personal construction and personal responsibility,” not just ownership and right of use, which is why the analogy with cars and hammers doesn’t work for me. (When I wrote my piece on “a personal cyberinfrastructure<\/a>,” I was thinking along these same lines: we are the web, the machine is us<\/a>, and the best way to get the best out of that macro-cyberinfrastructure is to practice building our own on its platform.)<\/p>\n

Why does “learning” matter? Why not just “network”? Because that word “network” gets used for lots of things, not just for deliberately self-directed learning. My network consists of friends, birds-of-a-feather, various information resources, etc. My *learning* network is my personal suite of trusted and inspiring experts<\/a>. That’s not the same as the folks I share experiences and interests with, though the two may (actually, do) overlap.<\/p>\n

(Digression: I miss the energies of 2005 and 2006, when so much of this conversation was exploratory instead of polarized and polarizing. That polarity is one of the reasons I’m finding it difficult to blog these days. Though I understand both are valuable, I like exploring more than arguing. While everyone else debates Beatles vs. Stones, the lads themselves are sharing a good time at the Scotch of St. James–while still enjoying their rivalry.)<\/p>\n

So I think all three words in PLN are important, and that their biggest value is that they suggest deliberate actions that don’t depend on someone else’s curriculum, degree program, or institution. Not just the open web, though it’s the open web that makes them possible–and that’s why the word “network” is vital as well.<\/p>\n

That said, it’s the wrangling and the seemingly inevitable hype cycle for these terms that really get me down. I remember all those arguments about “Web 2.0”: it is real, it’s not real, it’s hype, it’s O’Reilly branding, etc. etc. In my experience, Web 2.0 is a useful concept that has its limits, just like a bunch of other useful concepts (actually, they all have their limits, don’t they?). And believe it or not, I still talk to rooms of faculty where half or more of them haven’t heard the term, let alone the ideas it represents. Sometimes I think intensity of the edtech community makes us forget that the things we argue about or abandon are still news to lots of folks and have a lot of good left to do.<\/p>\n

P.S. I don’t know what a TLA is. I’m also iffy on CBDs, TYAs, ORCs, JUTs, and KWEs. But I am curious. Maybe I should ping my PLN.<\/p>\n

P.P.S. Whatever my PLN is, it’s not a Nixty, at least so far as I can see. On this count Alan and I are in total agreement.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Responding to Alan Levine’s post (be sure to check out his links and the comment stream): If the phrase “personal learning network,” or “PLN” (guess that makes me Dr. Evil), has really become CLICHE then I’m happy to drop the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4bHwM-lW","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1360"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1360\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1383,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1360\/revisions\/1383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}