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

“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.

They tried to take the same content, produced by the same people, in the same ways, and get subscribers and advertisers to pay for it on the web in a traditional model.

In contrast, only 27 percent of nearly 40,000 teachers surveyed thought that collaboration tools such as blogs, social networking sites, or wikis have a role in schools, and only 25 percent of future teachers responded that their preparation courses are teaching them how to use learning network tools to facilitate collaboration between students.

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).

Our schools need to harness each student’s natural propensity for participating in online spaces and funnel that energy into building powerful networks for learning that are used in every class almost every day.

Newspapers continued to try to do what they had always done—in effect, trying to adapt the Internet to them.

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).

It means that static textbooks that are outdated the day they are printed can be replaced with up-to-date information online that is continuously refreshed and renewed.

Today, according to Siemens (2007), “learning is a network formation process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources.”