I created the Survey Monkey in response to flaws that I felt were present in my original survey which was based on readers comments. Unfortunately it’s not prefect because I had to reduce number of options in first question to make it easier to rank responses.

Another flaw is I think the responses are heavily weighted by where people heard about the survey. For example many heard about it via twitter so these people rank twitter highly. A good addition to the survey would have been where did you hear about the survey so we could work out how much it influences their response.

The new survey included virtual worlds and you also see that Plurk rates highly. Meanwhile I stuffed up and forgot about the humble wiki. If you would like a copy of the Excel spreadsheet please let me know.

My gut feeling is that Virtual Worlds appeal to a particular personality type — not sure which but they are either an important part of how you like to learn or you aren’t fussed. Similar to twitter — some people really love twitter and yet others really hate.

Thanks for this research into PLNs. I was also just commenting on Liz B. Davis’s recent blog post about starting up PLNs about the absence of any mention of virtual worlds like Second Life, which is a huge and varied PLN source and community.

Now that I have straddled both virtual and other online communities, it seems almost has if there is a sizeable separation between these 2 sets of PLNs. I find that interesting to reflect upon. Virtual world members are more likely to crossover into non-3D communities (such as twitter, nings, social this and that, etc.) than visa versa. It would be interesting to investigate if there is a connection between right- and left-brain dominance and preference for virtual and non-virtual communities. RBers are more able to go over to the left side that LBers are able to shift to the right. Anything there?

My guess is that the response to your PLN survey, as is Liz’s reflects your own PLN (and thus “you”) and their “blindspots” and not the entire population of educational PLNs out there. This evidenced by the lack of virtual worlds data response and Plurk being in the black outer areas, both PLNs which you yourself do not really participate in.

I guess that’s why it is called a Personal Learning Network after all. I wonder what a more GLOBAL data set would look like?

Thanks, Frank (SL: Salty Saenz)

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