I’m trying to figure out what to do about my Personal Learning Network. This is out of control, and before you roll your eyes and say I’m exaggerating, just hear me out. My PLN (or what can loosely resemble one) has grown to the following sizes:
- Twitter updates from over 100 people, all fantastic professionals most of whom I have never met but love their links and info. Still trying to work out how ON EARTH to feed all those juicy tweets to my Google Reader, or another aggregator, since I feel that I am missing SO much by not clicking on each and every one of them…
- And of course, my Google Reader account…by now +1000 items unread…snifff….what’s the point of having all those Tweets eventually fed into it if I don’t have time to check them out? To feel better about myself I read some of them today and ended up spending 1.5 hours laughing out loud with Mrs. Mimi’s blog which I was happy to see has evolved into a book. Good for her…and I’m digressing again.
- Three e-mail accounts: junk-mail filled Hotmail, personal stuff Yahoo and fancy-looking Gmail for professional purposes. Nice having all those newsletters in my inbox, plus all the online updates of all the webinars I am missing while I teach, not to get me started with how frustrating it is to always have over 700 unread e-mails. I know. All my fault. No ones forces me to subscribe to all of those freebies…but who can resist them? (Are you detecting a pattern by now?…I think I am starting to develop a serious case of information addiction here…)
- Have joined over 25 Nings…yes, over 25. I am active in…none. Sorry, it’s the truth. Still haven’t figured out how to use them, I just like hanging out there, attend an event once in a while, try to post things if possible, but in most cases I sign up and just check updates by e-mail. Shame on me.
- Share my videos, PPTs and docs from workshops at Scribd, Slideshare and YouTube. I’m quite good at that. It’s just that I can’t help…subscribing to every person who creates a great presentation or video! And thus, the information overload starts going towards the ridiculous end of the scale…
- Clipmarks for cool stuff I find on not so cool websites. I clip, I save, I share, I post. Nice…then what?
- Del.icio.us and Diigo for social bookmarking. Again, no trouble with the sharing part, I love sharing! It’s the “adding everybody to my network” part that complicates it.
- And talking about sharing…I added Shareholic to my Firefox browser, to share more easily. Cool gadget. I hope my contacts aren’t feed up with my “Uh, I think this is cool too! I’ll Share it right now!”
- Last but not least, there’s Second Life. As if it wasn’t enough with one life, I went and got myself another. It’s all the Webheads‘ fault, for being so awesome and offer such fantastic workshops! Oh who am I kidding? It’s all me!!! I’m the one who went and got herself signed up for two sessions of EVO2009…and to think that they warn us about it!
Anyway…I guess what got me thinking is the last presentation I gave at FAAPI 2009 on using technology for professional development. Some time ago, when my PLN was smaller, I think I had it for a moment, I could profit from it. Or may be it was I had a clearer goal. In any case. I need to do some serious thinking. I’ll do some reading on PLN and see if I can pull it together. Any advice, please comment/tweet back! 
Pamela out
