Personal Learning Networks: Using the Power of Connections to Transform Education

Knowledge itself is moving from the individual to the individual and his contacts”

Learning networks are very different both in form and purpose in that we instead connect with people we don’t already know—helpful strangers who share our passion for a particular topic.

It means that teachers’ professional learning will take place in online connected spaces that span the globe.

When asked to design the school of the future, “communication tools” was the number one student pick, according to Speak Up 2009, a survey of almost 300,000 K–12 students (Project Tomorrow, 2010).

That means schools will need to embrace a form of learning that is fundamentally different from the one they have known.

We need, first, to take charge of our own learning, and next, help others take charge of their own learning. We need to move beyond the idea that an education is something that is provided for us, and toward the idea that an education is something that we create for ourselves. It is time, in other words, that we change our attitude toward learning

From the advent of the web in the mid-1990s, newspaper circulation steadily declined from over 60 million to approximately 40 million (Ahrens, 2009; Newspaper Association of America, 2011).

It means that static textbooks that are outdated the day they are printed can be replaced with up-to-date information online that is continuously refreshed and renewed.

“learning networks”? We mean the rich set of connections each of us can make to people in both our online and offline worlds who can help us with our learning pursuits.