This week I was invited to Melbourne to present at Converge08 by eWorks. I was involved in two presentations:
- How Tweet IT is! PD in the 21st Century
- The Connected Trainer – presenting with Simon Brown
Emphasis of both was on the different aspects of personal learning networks (PLNs). This post is a quick overview of my “How Tweet IT is! PD in the 21st Century” presentation.
Why this title? To highlight how increasing numbers of people are using online tools to create their own personal learning networks (PLNs) which enhance their professional development (PD) beyond what is often achievable in traditional f2f workshops.
Throughout the entire presentation (1 hr) I tried to model how a PLN works by:
- Making the conference participants part of my personal learning network (approx. 300 people) by giving people tasks and encouraging conversation
- Sharing results from my PLN survey while also live demoing the most popular tools used in building PLNs
- Asking my online PLN to engage with the audience (using Twitter)
Using Conference Participants as a PLN
I explained that in a PLN members frequently help each other and provide assistance. This is how I used conference participants as my personal learning network:
- Official photographer (Becky) – used my Canon Powershot to take photos of whatever interested her.
- Flickr Poster (Steve Cahill) – used my iphone to take photos and upload immediately to Flickr using FlickrUP.
- MacBook Assistant – Seconds before my presentation was due to start we discovered a problem with my Internet connection so had to borrow Carol McCulloch’s laptop to use her wireless and she had to use my MacBook for the conference live blogging. She had never used a Mac previously so an audience member stood behind Carol and helped when necessary.
- Office 2007 Assistants – I’d never used Office 2007 or Vista so I enlisted the participants to help whenever I got stuck
- To answer questions and vote (on if they used a tool and off course their favorite chocolate 🙂 )
Becky, Steve and Carol had never used the technology which I used to emphasize that in PLN’s we learn by playing until we find out how it works; and if we get into trouble we ask others for help (which they all did). PS Carol may have muttered some un-nice words about both the MacBook and me (I definitely owed her big time! Thanks so much Carol for the help).
Poor Steve, my iphone was playing up and the SIM card locked up on him….. So he also learnt that being part of a PLN can be stressful sometimes 🙂
Survey Results of Conference Participants
Most people at the conference had limited knowledge and experience using the main tools for building a PLN.
Very few had used Twitter so during the presentation I demonstrated the instantaneous nature of twitter by sending the following tweets to my twitter network:
I added the discussion of chocolate so I could highlight that what question you ask impacts on whether people respond and how online tools like twitter can be used to build relationships.
Interesting fact — dark chocolate was the most popular chocolate by both my twitter network and conference participants. I used this to highlight that you can’t always trust your PLN (chuckling).
FINAL THOUGHTS
Thanks to eWorks for inviting me to Converge08 and all the people at the conference who made me feel welcome. Special thanks to Dean Groom for helping choose the title of the presentation (with added help from my twitter network) and for writing the conference abstract.
Don’t forget:
- I’ve posted the results of my PLN survery here
- I’ve created a PLN Yourself site to help new people work through setting up their own Personal Learning network.
If anyone can locate statistics on chocolate sales by milk, white and dark could you please share? Would love to know what is the top selling flavor. Surely it can’t be dark chocolate?
Sue Waters 
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