JOURNAL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS EDUCATION - Naspaa

Using Personal Learning Networks to Leverage Communities of Practice
coherent conceptual framework within which to revise our classrooms. Dominant
learning theories such as behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism are largely
concerned with the processes of individual learning even when viewing that
learning within a group, as the social constructivists do. The network age, however,
has brought an overabundance of new knowledge necessitating an examination
of how we learn as well as the manner in which information is acquired (Rudestam
& Schoenholtz-Read, 2010). Educators need a new way to think about their
classrooms, a way that accounts for the hyperconnectivity afforded by modern
social networks.
Adult professionals are qualified to design their own informal programs of
continuing education by use of Personal Learning Networks (PLNs). Online
Communities of Practice (CoP) among public affairs professions can and will
evolve, and classrooms of pre-service students can become peripheral participants
in those communities while also being primary participants in digital learning
communities facilitated by instructors. We do not anticipate the disintermediation
of universities or of professional educators. We agree with Cross (1981, p. 250) that
There is every reason to think that the presence of a critical mass of
gourmet learners in the society [will] stimulate the education industry
in much the same way that gourmet cooks or physical fitness buffs
have sparked remarkable vitality in the industries that serve them.
Connectivism
A scholarly conversation has emerged about connectivism, or the idea that
knowledge is distributed across networks of connections (Downes, 2005; Siemens,
2006; Siemens, 2008a) and that learning is the ability to construct and traverse
networks at multiple scales (Downes, 2007; Siemens, 2004) including neural
connections, social connections, and logical connections. For connectivists,
learning is a process of sense making (Siemens, 2008b) that seeks to instantiate
patterns of connectivity in the mind that are accurate reflections of associations
in the real world. Students of connectivism are attempting to understand both
individual learning and collective learning within a single evolving theory of
learning in a networked age. Connectivism, then, informs much of the following
exploration of one way to integrate social media into the public affairs classroom,
and it may just provide all educators with a framework for moving their classrooms
out of the industrial age and into the network age.
Overview of Web 2.0 Technologies
Web 2.0 refers to a great variety of Web applications and services that support
social networks and collaboration on the Internet. The term came into wide use
in about 2004. Before Web 2.0, the World Wide Web was a vast array of
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