Journal of Public Affairs Education

Using Personal Learning Networks to Leverage Communities of Practice
Figure 4.
Keith Hamon’s Web Blog
I ceased to be the sole source of information and knowledge and became a
co-learner with the students, who watched me work to integrate new information
and knowledge into the course. While the course always had a syllabus and
a common text, I usually incorporated new information from online readings,
weaving them into the course discussion and using this as support for or challenges
to the text. My new insights were largely derived from my own PLN connecting
me to the blogs of professionals I follow. Students were able to shift from a
modality of memorization to one of inquiry. Most students found inquiry much
more interesting than memorization. It was often the high-achieving A students
who were most troubled by the loss of definitive, rote-learnable tidbits of
information. They learned to adapt to revised expectations.
My passion for teaching was rekindled with the influx of new ideas and new
thinking. I was relieved to give up the burden of being the sole authority in the
class to being an accomplice, a more experienced guide, a curator. I shifted from
lecturing to dialogue. Consequently, my students became much more interesting
to me as they became more active participants in the exploration of knowledge.
Use of my teaching blog caused my attention to shift from reacting to
students in class to proactively framing the face-to-face class. Thus, classroom
face time became much more efficient and productive as students more frequently
arrived in class with some notion of what was being discussed or demonstrated.
Moreover, the students’ preliminary comments on the blog often shifted my
preparatory focus from making a presentation to responding to the issues that
were important to them and the state of their knowledge of those issues. I knew
these issues before class because students had already posted comments on my
teaching blog. This could also have been accomplished if each student had had a
20 Journal of Public Affairs Education