What Use Is Your Personal Learning Network

Having recently completed the Learning In The Network Age FutureLearn course with University of Southampton, I am going to do a review – Richard style .

One of the key themes of the course is understanding and enabling your Personal Learning Network (PLN), but this raises the question for some of us at least – What is a PLN anyway?

There are plenty of detailed definitions online, but simply put, a PLN is the sources and resources you use to acquire information.  This is to say, not only where do you get your information from, but how do you access this information?  Broadly it can split into online and offline, and can include such a range of things such as tv, newspapers, friends, search engines, social media, libraries, blogs, work place.

Something that surprised a few people on the course is that the way we think about our network may not actually reflect the way we use it, or even be consistent – my weekday PLN is predominantly offline, whereas my weekend PLN is predominantly online – I use my phone a lot during the week to access information, but hardly at all at the weekend.

A good way to get a better understanding of your PLN is to map it, or represent it graphically.  The course produced 2 PLN maps for me, one for weekday and one for weekend.

So we come back to the opening question – What Use Is Your PLN?

Knowing where you are getting your information from is useful for several reasons:
Firstly it can help you identify if you are over-reliant on a small range of information sources.  By diversifying your inputs, you can help to reduce bias.
Secondly it can help you get a positive feedback on your resources available.  By reminding and exposing you to other sources and methods of information gathering, it can help you develop new methods of gaining information.

Related to both the above, it can help identify and reduce the impact of echo chambers and filter bubbles.

An echo chamber is essentially where you associate with like-minded people who hold similar opinions – it can be very easy, especially with social media, to surround yourself with people who ‘like’ the same things as you do – this is actively encouraged by the structure of many social media platforms.

A filter bubble is where dis-harmonious, or contradictory information is discarded in favour of information that fits with other information inputs.

An example of the echo chamber and filter bubble in action can be seen in the example below (taken from a real situation, I just changed a few details to protect the individuals concerned)

Bob and Sue are friends on facebook, and are discussing a recently published WHO study on global warming and rises in malaria outbreaks.  Bob is advocating more measures to reduce global warming, whilst Sue is a little more cautious and highlights other studies which reached different conclusions.  Jake joins the conversation, and agrees with Sue.  When Bob points out some criticisms that have been raised with the studies Jake cites, Jake blocks Bob to keep his comments from appearing on his screen.
Sounds petty, yet this happens regularly.  We also see it in less obvious versions in our daily lives.  Being aware of it means we can counter-act it.  If we only read one newspaper, we only get one viewpoint on the news – sometimes I will access news media outlets from outside the UK, just to get a different perspective on the news.

If we are engaging with, and developing our PLN, we open ourselves up to new ideas, and new possibilities.  example, from recent FutureLearn courses I have met people who have given me different perspectives on ideas and knowledge I have had for sometime, and shown new ways of doing the same thing, as well as encouraging me to develop myself.  This is a good incentive to continue to review and develop our PLN.

In summary: a PLN is about more than “learning”, it is about how we relate to the world we live in.  If we want to get the most from the world, we have to engage with it, and this means sometimes breaking outside of our comfort zone – you never know, you may find a new, bigger comfort zone 🙂