Personal Learning Networks: Because We Don't Know What You Need to Know; And We Know That and Can Describe That!

Targeted Learning, such as that made more possible through personalized use of technology to build and develop content,  can lead to more future oriented learning. Traditional classrooms can often be a bastion of conservative thought because schooling is generally composed of students taking a proscribed, accredited path directed by (and filled with) other people taking that same proscribed, accredited path.  And, young people are the ones with one foot in the future so they have more vested in this type of learning. 

Education has to continue to evolve to stay relevant. We might think of traditional f2f lectures as a Henry Longfellow poem, at one time the most popular in the world but over time not adapting to the changing meter and other schemes so that Longfellow now is seen as quaint and outdated, not the Modernist that Whitman was just a few years later. 

For education to talk its more lofty goal of human development -- of teachers, content, technology, and interaction combining to help people create and actualize potential that leads to a culture of this same human development, different models and more patient strategies might be seen. Yes, we need to advance to the universal goal of sustainable human development but increasingly that can be done with individualized methods and using content rich environments both online and f2f. 

Education has long been universal for some specific reasons, including in the industrial/agricultural paradigm, most people needed the same general skills to ensure economic relevance. Also, in terms of general citizen-based learning, there were basic literacy and critical thinking skills that allowed us to fulfill our democratic responsibilities, such as participating in decision making. Of course, there was also the physical reality that we all had to learn together because the educational resources (schools, teachers, administrators) were limited to buildings to access the most possible people.

But, now our economic necessities are diverging at a very rapid rate. All of us need to know different things at different times to remain economically relevant and culturally aware. Our populations are more diverse, our needs are more diverse, and our contexts are more diverse. This is driving the need for more personalized learning and technology is allowing us to address this via Personal Learning Networks (PLNs). 

PLN's work not because they are aspirational but because they are based not only on economic reality but on the way we learn-- spontaneously and through networks, both technological and human. We can build the process and then, just like the principles behind the Twitter concept, people will supply their own context. Twitter builds on the reality that keywords are the way we scaffold and construct knowledge, letting the user/reader fill in gaps with their minds. Our audience will always think faster than we can create content, so let them use that skill to fill in the gaps and construct knowledge by leading them in the direction they need to go through keywords. 

Since we can never know what are audiences already knows and how they will use what we add in a particular context, we can help them by introducing a set of guiding principles and direct their learning through developing personalized learning modules. 

Modular and personalized learning is one way for businesses to grow for example, as a new employee may have certain skills but need other skills. A different employee, starting at the same time, may have different skills and different educational needs.

The information age has given rise to the networked age, where we are all moving into a space where people's careers are not on resumes, but in social networking sites. This can be seen in articles touting the newest apps like "Meet Your Digital Butler: Humin, a Social OS" (Wall Street Journal 7/21/14) that mentions products like Humin and Google Now. Our ability to gather people together with relevant information will become the next sign of economic growth and economic mobility, building on the information age that preceded it and the industrial and agricultural systems before that. We are essentially moving from the information age to the contextual information age, where being able to fit information/knowledge into the right space will be where the value is.

The increased importance of contextual information should make libraries and librarians more important. After all, one of the beauties of a library is that it is networked knowledge, designed to fill the context of the institution and its member faculty, students, etc. Librarians can help build pathways to information based on its relevance and credibility, just as other instructors do. Google and other providers can give you information and they are trying to develop the capacity to create contextual information but librarians still have the edge in this area because of the training and human factor in search.

The Wall Street Journal's "A Game Plan for Job Seekers" (March 7, 2014) talks about the flexibility and adaptability of job hunting and how the search itself is the epitome of learning--it involves flexibility through trial and error; networking; random encounters; and adjusting to changes in the economy and other variables. One of the most interesting findings, according to the article, is the fact that renters often earn more than homeowners because of their flexibility. The flexibility may be most apparent in the ability to more easily move to where the jobs are, but it struck me that perhaps the renter frame of mind is also more open to change in general. Even if a renter does not need to move for a job, they may be more open to changing their ideas about strategies, who to talk to, what experiences to try, etc.

This flexibility and willingness to change is one of the most essential ingredients to learning. A career search is an example of a series of solving a complex problems with a lot of moving parts. The economy is always changing; employer needs are always changing, etc. Is there an ideal number of times for information to circulate for it to be effective (in a job search or otherwise)?

One of the challenges of teaching is to remain flexible in our approach. Reading the crowd (the students) means changing techniques or lesson plans on the fly if something is not working or is working very well. One of the challenges of using produced material, as many power points and blended techniques are, is that we might use these tools if they are working or not, because we have already prepared them. 

We need to be flexible to adapt or change materials; often out of necessity as navigational strategies might change as with a new web site requiring new ways of entering a database. There are also changes in databases themselves and of course the subject may be updated due to new research findings, etc. 


Now, technology is changing possibilities and we can go from the universal to the personal much more efficiently. This builds on the reality that different people need different skills at different times. There is also the reality that we have international learning needs and other variables that were never as relevant or as possible as today. For example, in my trips to China and most recently Turkey, I met professionals with similar training needs as their American counterparts and yet there were areas that were very unique to a particular time and place.

Rather than presenting content, we might refocus our strategy on presenting questions and then suggesting pathways to those questions (content and activities to bring those pathways together). 

Personally, I am applying this flexibility/adaptability to my life outside the classroom. Rather than a Shabbat "day" of rest, for example, I am trying to apply the concept of spiritual rest/peace throughout the week, resulting in minutes (seconds) and hours of Shabbat rest throughout the week rather than on one particular day.