Unit 3: Networking

I have to admit that in this course thus far I seem to be doing alright on the P and the L but not so good on the N!

 

I signed up for this course because I was becoming aware of the potential power of online communities to enhance my own professional practice and of those around me at school. I work in a technologically well-supported school, but I was also becoming aware that we are relatively insular with regards to new communication tools being used ‘out there’ in the wider education and teaching community.

 

Many years ago, when I was at uni, I remember doing some work on ‘discourse communities’ and how knowledge is shaped and shared through these communities constituted through a common language and practice. It links nicely with the idea of reflective practice, as I find that it is in conversations with colleagues and finding out what others have done in their classrooms that I am prompted to reflect on my own practice and extend my repertoire of teaching strategies.

 

I think ‘discourse communities’ was an idea from Michel Foucault, and he was writing before Web 2.0. Nonetheless, as I navigated through Twitter, and finally worked out that I needed to make a new email account so that I could make a new (professional) Facebook page, I made a connection in my mind between that old learning about ‘discourse communities’ and this new learning about PLNs. It struck me that this is what it is about – developing, extending, participating in and enhancing a community of practice using online tools. I could see right away that this could be a great – and cheap! – way of staying in touch with discussions happening in the English teacher world beyond the faculty where I work.

 

I have ‘followed’ VATE (Victorian Association for the Teaching of English) on Twitter, as well as SLVPLN, Inside a Dog, Centre for Youth Literature, the Wheeler Centre, Bright Ideas, and some publishers, authors and reviewers whose work I would like to know more about. I am always on the look-out for new reads for my students. As a faculty, many of us are also perpetually on the look-out for suitable texts for the classroom and literature circles, and I can see that social networking tools may be a great way to source information about these reads and how they have been taught elsewhere.

 

However, there is a rub. I find that social media can take a lot of very precious time without necessarily delivering quality – my Twitter page has featured ‘pushed’ tweets from some corporate or marketing entity every day for the past two weeks. Also, I am not a TL, so I feel a bit of an outlier in this course — my main game is not dealing with information tools for a school library but with students in the English classroom. Marking, lesson planning, assessment, reporting, and communicating with parents are the major demands on my time. I have no input about the school’s ‘web-presence’, tools put on the intranet, or even in-house pages like the library portal.

 

Facebook and Twitter are not blocked for personal use in my school, but they are not part of the endorsed ‘tech toolbox’. I would like to someday teach my students how to develop their own PLN, but, as mentioned in a previous post, the rules governing the use of online social media tools in our school make this potentially treacherous ground. Students can access Facebook at school, but it is for personal use. Staff are explicitly discouraged from using Facebook as members of the school – we only use it as private individuals. I have had a Facebook account for some years, but I just use it to keep up with news about my family and friends.

 

I do think there may be some redundancy in signing up for many tools. I tried Scoop.It after a SLVPLN member recommended it on Diigo, but I suspect it may be a replication of what I might get out of EverNote or Pocket – both of which I have found myself using quite happily to file away useful information. The tagging function is just beautiful.

 

I can see the value in the online sharing of information, knowledge and ideas around a particular professional interest.  For me, it is about enlarging the scope of where I can source and share information about professional practice, without having to get approval and funding to go to conferences (an increasingly difficult feat!). Twitter and Facebook are ways of tapping into professional conversations beyond staff room partitions. My hope for my PLN is that it can make for more immediate and timely information and more reflective practice.