My PLN: The Journey Begins

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Having received some professional development training in Positive Education and working in a Positive Education school, I already had some connections to this network, albeit quite limited. I am somewhat of a social media introvert (Cook, Johnson & Stager, 2016); my two main platforms have been Facebook and Instagram, where I make a point of keeping my Friend lists restrictive. Whilst I will look, like and comment on friends’ posts daily, I do not frequently post myself and prefer to keep life private. 

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My initial PLN (March, 2019) was therefore very basic:

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Establishing a professional digital identity within social media platforms caused me some anxiety, as I recognised that my online friends were not necessarily interested in my professional postings (Marwick & boyd, 2011) but in order to expand my PLN and gain the most from it, I would need to follow and connect with others. Having never used Twitter before, and therefore not having any friends or followers on this platform, I quickly came to realise that I felt far less vulnerable establishing my professional, academic identity (Barbour & Marshall, 2012) on this platform, and as such, a lot of my focus was initially on using Twitter. With essentially a blank canvas to work from, I started linking (Oddone, 2019) to other people and organisations by searching in Twitter for established Positive Education institutions and following them. I began to re-tweet though unsurprisingly received limited response given my few followers.

 

In an effort to explore and discover how to maximise my network more, I stretched (Oddone, 2019) and discovered TweetDeck where I began to follow particular hashtags (e.g. #PosEd, #PositivePsychology) that I had seen appearing on the groups I was following. This tool made the world of difference in my strategic network building and PLN establishment (Cook et al., 2016) as I could quickly see prominent Tweeters within the field and could also identify what kind of posts particular hashtags attracted. My linking became more efficient by following people suggested by Twitter and those prominent tweeters in TweetDeck. I decided to become a more active user and try to become more known in the network by liking and occasionally commenting and re-tweeting on the posts of others within those hashtags. As I did this, I slowly started gaining some followers.

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“As teachers stretch their experiences, they explore different platforms, and develop strategies to leverage more diverse connections and information” 

(Oddone, Hughes & Lupton, 2019).

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As I became more confident of my professional digital identity through positive interactions on Twitter, I returned to Facebook and Instagram to consider how my personal and professional identities could be either kept separate or melded together with the risk of ‘context collapse’ (Marwick & boyd, 2011) and which option would allow me to benefit from the opportunities offered through these platforms. I originally considered creating a separate account to navigate the tension of my two identities (boyd, 2008), however, I realised that my personal identity is still very much moulded by my professional interests – after all, most passionate teachers are not able to leave their love of teaching at the school gate! Having some online friends who are teachers would also be strategic in helping me to develop my PLN – whilst many are not trained in Positive Education, I truly believe the principles of Positive Education and Positive Psychology should be (and usually already are) utilised in every classroom, and therefore my friends would be benefit from what I had to say and could hopefully connect their other friends in the Education field.

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However, with the vast majority of my friends not in the Education industry, and not wanting to alienate my personal connections with them (boyd, 2008), I made some decisions on how to best proceed:

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• I joined a public Facebook group, Teachers Supporting Teachers, on the recommendation of a teacher friend. With 900 members, this was a safe way for me to share ideas and start to interact with other teachers.

• Having learnt from a Tweetchat that you could also follow hashtags in Instagram, I started researching which hashtags to follow and which hashtags to include in my own posts to connect with those communities (see PLN map).

• When posting to my own Instagram and Facebook pages, and because the concepts within the field of Positive Education are so diverse, I decided to select elements that would appeal to teacher friends of all disciplines as well as my non-teacher friends. The themes of ‘love’, ‘kindness’ and ‘gratitude’ are concepts that are applicable to people in all walks of life, and gratitude in particular has been gaining a lot of traction in regard to enhancing well-being with scientific research supporting it.

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My PLN Journey Develops: Critical Incidences

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I began to post across multiple platforms to build on my participatory culture (Jenkins, Ito & boyd, 2015) – Twitter, Instagram and initially in the Teachers Supporting Teachers Facebook group. The development of my PLN can best be analysed through the lens of a series of critical incidences (Butterfield, Borgen, Amundson & Maglio, 2005; Oddone, 2019). Click on each to read how these major events helped to shape my digital identity and the direction in which my network grew:

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At this stage, I felt that whilst I had been getting pleasing responses, my network was stagnating (Rennie & Mason, 2004). On Twitter especially, I felt that I was seeing the same sort of Tweets over and over (for example, promotions of upcoming conferences in America, where I would not be able to attend). I decided I needed to be more strategic with the hashtags I followed (Cook et al., 2016). Based on the success I had experienced in the Facebook group, I started searching for other Education groups which appeared to focus on the general sharing of ideas and thoughts. I came across Educators Engaging with Educators – this group has over 12k followers and appeared to be a good mix of both Australian and International teachers. Within Twitter and Instagram, I looked closer at the kinds of posts that hashtags were attracting and made some changes – for example, I removed #PosEd as there were far too many photos of people ‘posing’ and changed this too #PositiveEducation (using CamelCase to assist such a long phrase). I then decided to include two general teaching hashtags (#education and #teacherlife) both of which posted frequently and with content that seemed in-line with the kinds of Positive Education topics I was interested in.

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Up until this point, my interactions and posts had been restricted to the linking and stretching stages (Oddone, 2019) of re-sharing the work the others and engaging mostly by liking others’ posts, where I was finding and attracting followers in this manner. To extend my PLN further and move my interactions to an amplifying level of creating and contributing my own work to invite feedback and more meaningful interaction (Oddone, 2019), I created several digital artefacts which formed the final major critical incidences. At this stage, I assessed again how efficiently I was connecting with others. I realised that casting my net too broadly did not necessarily mean access to more information, as I had originally anticipated, but could simply mean too much irrelevant content (Richardson & Mancabelli, 2011). I changed from following and tagging the #teaching to #teachers and added #kindnessmatters and #teachersfollowteachers, based on the interactions that I could see.

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For a summary of how each of these incidences influenced my PLN and thus were ‘critical’ to its development, click here. Many critical incidences also occurred in the manner of getting no, or a lacklustre, response to sharing or re-tweeting. Each of these made me reflect on why this may have occurred – as a general rule, I have found that the time and day that I post (weekends vs school days, for example) can affect the response time. The type of post also has a massive impact on responses; as stated earlier, posts which are visual, colourful and easy to read tend to attract more likes and comments, as they are not time consuming or difficult to engage with.

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My PLN: The Present

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Click on map to magnify. Click here to see an animated version. 

Hint - click on the Play button at the top left to begin. You can change the speed of the animation with the slide bar down the bottom right.

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As can be seen, my initial PLN (indicated in grey) has grown substantially over the course of the past 4 months. This growth can also been seen in the Twitter analytics, charting my progress in terms of numbers of tweets and organic impressions over the past several month:

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Positive Education is showing definite growth across the Education industry with just 9 schools registered to Positive Education Schools Australia in 2011 to over 100 schools today (Ferguson, 2018) and over 2000 schools internationally registered to the International Positive Education Network. However, this is still quite a small community and many of my connections were made via ‘Positive Psychology’ which is far more active but not as specific to the field of Education.

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Before I started to establish my PLN, I would have considered myself a hybrid between a ‘constant explorer’ (Odonne, 2019, p. 156) within the general umbrella of Education, where I found myself motivated by different content and found interest in searching and reading about general pedagogy, and a ‘linear linker’ (Odonne, 2019, p. 178) in regard to my interactions of Positive Education, which were restricted mostly to my colleagues at school and whatever I could directly find on the internet to fulfil a specific need. I now see myself moving more solidly into the ‘constant explorer’ role, and also a ‘self-directed sharer’ (Odonne, 2019, p. 159) as I have become more confident and started to establish a more prominent digital identity.

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My PLN: The Future

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As can be seen, my digital identity has developed quite quickly in a short period time - the diagram above identifies how the three elements of my digital identity developed simultaneous to my PLN (Lupton, et al., 2018). I am conscious that in some ways this was an unnatural development rate, given the almost forced social media use for the purposes of this experiment. However, the skills, knowledge and confidence that I have gained in this process, as well as the insight into the benefits of connected learning (Ito et al., 2013; Garcia et al., 2014), have prepared me well to continue to develop my PLN in a more steady and organic manner. Due to the afore mentioned small community within Positive Education, my interactions were quite asynchronous (Dron & Anderson, 2014) where I engaged in my own time. I attempted to find more synchronous activities, such as Tweetchats, however, I was unable to find any (either due to my still-developing network size or because they do not yet occur within this network). I can therefore see potential for myself to move into a ‘pioneering change agent’ role (Odonne, 2019, p. 164) where I could put the spotlight on Positive Education within the Positive Psychology realm to make this community more active. I am excited by the prospect of seeing how my Positive Education PLN can evolve by making more contacts and sharing more resources in an area I am so passionate about. However, I can also see great benefit in developing as a connected educator in other areas of professional interest – such as leadership, which is an emerging part of my professional identity and one which benefits greatly from the support and advice of a greater network. Eventually, as I continue to build and expand my PLN, I would also be able to hopefully occupy the role of ‘evolved connector’ (Odonne, 2019, p. 164).

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Finally, I can clearly see the benefit of using my newfound insights and skills in the classroom as a teacher. Many researchers in best Education practice report that whilst schools and teachers make the effort to bring innovation and technological tools into their practice (Thomson, 2015), having historically occupied the role as ‘gate-keeper’ of information and knowledge makes fully embracing the connections and learning journeys that students have on offer too challenging to shift their daily teaching practice (Garcia et al., 2014), which I can relate with.

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“The effective educator embraces cultural changes as an opportunity to connect learning to the real world”

(Johnson & McElroy, 2010, p.9)

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Part of the caution exercised by teachers and schools, myself included, regarding information access through technology stems from a legitimate concern of the sheer amount of content available (Rennie & Mason, 2004) and both the appropriateness and accuracy of this content, as well as the ability of students to sift though this information – or what can be seen as having to make meaning from chaos (Siemens, 2005). Information needs to be moulded, organised and embedded in context before it transforms into knowledge (Stoll, Fink & Earl, 2003). The Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) recognises the importance of developing these critical thinking skills however there is not yet the emphasis on building connections and networks to learn from, which can open up the world of learning beyond the classroom and abilities of the teacher (Naussbaum-Beach, 2012). Creating tasks and leading my students through the process of designing their own personal learning network, with a focus on developing their interests, relationships and opportunities (Dyson & Larson, 2019), is an area that I would like to explore and bring into my teaching practice as my own skills and understanding as a connected educator continue.

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- By Karyn Kybus