Report and Reflection 5- Microblogging and building your PLN

This week, going back to the Personal Learning Network we are given further understanding.  As defined by Kate Klingensmith, a personal learning network is the entire collection of people with whom you engage and exchange information, usually online. (Klingensmith, 2009) Personal learning networks can be very beneficial to anyone that uses them. “The beauty of people communicating online is the ease of finding and sharing information and – if you ask for it – the group feedback that you get on ideas and projects.” (Klingensmith, 2009) Your PLN can be built through a number of different online tools that can further one’s learning, such as Feedly, blogs, RSS feeds, Twitter and even Facebook.

These personal learning networks can be built up over time and can always be reformed or improved upon based on your learning goals. For example a student’s personal learning network may change based on what they are doing in school, as described by Vicki Davis. A PLN can become a student's virtual locker, and its content changes based on the student's current course work. When a term paper is assigned, the students will search the Web to sign up for information that will feed into their personalized Web page to construct a PLN for that topic. When they get a new project, they will assemble another page. (Davis, 2009) Another way to find information is by networking, and one of the main tools to do this is twitter.

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Twitter is an extremely popular networking site where users can connect with their friends and family, their favourite celebrities, educational or personal accounts and so many more. Twitter allows you to not only follow and look at others ideas or information, but allows you to create and add your own and collaborate with others to richen your learning network. Personally, I did not get twitter until I started university and do not really use it often. I don’t post anything of my own, I just use mostly to receive sports updates and to follow different accounts that I find funny. I find that while the content of twitter may not be that rich (only 140 characters per tweet) is provides the fastest updates for anything, whether it be new related or sports related, etc.

This week while browsing my Feedly, I found an interesting article titled “disparity in life spans of the rich and the poor growing”. The article details how the life expectancy gap between the rich and the poor is growing. A study found that for men born in 1920, there was a six-year difference in life expectancy between the top 10 percent of earners and the bottom 10 percent. For men born in 1950 the difference more than doubled to 14 years. I found this to be an alarming statistic, and one of the possible causes stated in the article was that the amount of smokers among the rich is declining, comparing to those less fortunate. Two other possible causes were obesity and drug addictions among the poor.

This was another week of learning and building my PLN, and again I found an interesting article that I never would have known about if it wasn’t for my Feedly! I am looking forward to what is in store for next week!

-Jordan