Talk for the Partnership for African Governance and Social Research launch training with their public policy faculty.

1. Personal Learning Networks
Professor Jodi Sandfort
University of Minnesota, School of Public
Affairs
sandf002@umn.edu

2. Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed
under Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

3. Changing African Context
• 23 countries where
nearly 2/3rd have
mobile phones.
• Considerable growth
• Country by country
prevalence, Gallop poll
(2013)

5. Students….
iStockphoto: Dean Mitchell

6. Workshop Learning Objectives
• Explore how information environment can
support your own scholarship
– Teaching, Research & Engagement
• Assess your own personal learning network
• Consider easy ways to “fill in” the gaps

7. Personal Learning Networks (PLN)
Social and technical networks that
individuals’ develop in support of life long
learning and personal development

8. “Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous
environments of shifting core elements – not
entirely under the control of the
individual. Learning (defined as actionable
knowledge) can reside outside of ourselves (within
an organization or database), is focused on
connecting specialized information sets, and the
connections that enable us to learn more are more
important than our current state of knowing.”
George Siemens, (2005) “Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the
Digital Age.”

9. Adaptation of Blooms’ Cognitive Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, 1956

10. Assessing Your Learning Network
1) Think about three or four focus areas / topics of
your scholarship (your teaching, research &
engagement)
2) On paper, place yourself at the center
3) Use different colors, arrange the topics around
you
4) Document the people / resources you draw
upon to learn about these topics

11. Analysis
1) What is surprising?
2) What are areas where you need to
enrich your network?
3) How might you do so?

12. Intentional Development of
Personal Learning Networ
Personal
Learning
Network
Collect &
Curate
Share Construct
Collaborate

13. Analysis
What are the tools you currently use to:
Collect & Curate?
Share?
Construct?
Collaborate?

14. Illustrative Tools
that Support
Learning
Categories

15. Enriching your Own PLN
Learning Objects….
….”anything that is set up to constitute or
prompt the subject matter of an interactive
teaching session.” (Alford & Brock, 2014:2)
Collecting & Curating

16. Open Educational
Resources
Freely accessible, openly formatted and
licensed media used for teaching,
learning, assessment and research

17. http://www.gapminder.org/
http://gdeltproject.org/ http://www.geonames.org/

20. Enriching your Own PLN
Share

22. Enriching your Own PLN
Construct

23. Manage Scholarly Articles & Create Bibliographies

24. Create visual engagement for talks & Lectures

25. Enriching your Own PLN
Collaborate

26. Enriching your Own PLN
• Time each week to explore and develop new
resources
• Create diagram (or modify) as you go –
provides framework for your own learning
tools (to learn more follow this link)
• Also teach concept to aid students in policy
research

27. • Build out your personal learning network and
learn more
• Try out tools described
• Capture this presentation (including hyperlinks)
• Find & Share new ones. Share via Twitter
#MRPPlaunch @mrppafrica