PLNs

Cultivating a personal learning network by Howard Rheingold (Source: Peeragogia, goo.gl/ygOQL7, under CC BY-SA 3.0 licence)

PLNs are personal learning networks, sometimes also called professional learning networks. They are trusted digital networks of people (experts and peers) and resources (websites, apps and tools, nowadays potentially including generative AI chatbots) which serve as sources of support and information, and many of which may be enriched by reciprocal sharing. These networks are places for keeping up to date, asking questions, and sharing insights and resources related to your work and/or interests. They often involve analogue (real world) connections (such as colleagues you meet face-to-face) and resources (such as a library of books) alongside digital connections and resources, but it is worth remembering that digital tools, platforms and apps give users access to much wider potential networks than what is available to them in their face-to-face settings. For this reason, the concept of PLNs has become much more prominent with the arrival of the digital era.

PLNs can play an important role in continuing professional development and lifelong learning. In recent years, it has been suggested that educational institutions have a role to play in helping students set up rich and diverse PLNs, on which they can continue to build in their future lives and careers. PLNs are widely seen as essential for educators at all levels – primary, secondary and tertiary – and many PLN resources and studies relate to their use by both pre-service teachers and in-service/practising teachers.

A PLN is centred around a single individual. It doesn’t depend on any particular digital tools, platforms or apps, but often involves a mixture of web 2.0, or social media, tools, many of which are easily accessible on mobile devices. Sometimes the different tools are tied together through an aggregator platform. Note that a PLE, or personal learning environment, can be a subset of an individual’s wider PLN in which focused learning occurs at a particular time, usually during a course of study.

In a 2008 survey of teachers, reported in Listen to the Wisdom of Your Network, Sue Waters found that the most commonly platforms used in their PLNs were the microblogging service Twitter (now renamed X),  the folksonomy services del.icio.us and Diigo, RSS aggregators, and blogs. In a 2013 survey of educators, Nik Peachey found that the tools shown below were the most popular based on the number of respondents who mentioned each one (as graphed from publicly available results by Mark Pegrum). The microblogging service Twitter/X, the aggregator service Scoop.it (see the microblogging page for more details), and the social networking site Facebook were in the lead. Overall, there was considerable common ground between these two snapshots of PLNs from five years apart, even if changing trends were also evident.

Popular social media tools within educators’ PLNs (source: survey by Nik Peachey, public results graphed by Mark Pegrum)

Nowadays, many of the same services remain popular, accompanied by some newer services. Teachers commonly make use of microblogging services like Twitter/X (but see the microblogging page of this website for a discussion of the effects of recent changes to this platform), social (and/or professional) networking services like Facebook and LinkedIn, and social sharing services like Pinterest and Instagram.

In practice, a PLN often consists of overlapping networks on different services, which are linked into a single network by the individual at their centre. Technological platforms for linking different services together include automated aggregators like Symbaloo, also listed on the PLEs page.

To assess the extent of your own personal learning network, and to get ideas for expanding it, check out the following references:

• • What’s a PLN? And 3 Ways Teachers Can Get Connected [Video] (Common Sense Education, 2017)
  • How to Get a PLN [Blog post] (Kelly Nelson-Danley/TeachHub, 2020)
  • Building a PLN [Short course] (The Teacher Challenge, 2021)
  • Professional Learning Networks [Encyclopedia entry] (Torrey Trust, Jeffrey Carpenter, & Daniel Krutka/EdTechnica, 2022)
  • Personal Learning Network [assignment] (University of Northern Iowa, 2023)
  • What is a Personal Learning Network? [Video + webpage] (FutureLearn, n.d.)

More references on this topic are available on the Publications on Digital Learning page.

Last update: January 2024.