I went on public record several times this year to say that the best continuing professional development (CPD) I have ever received has been through Twitter. Now it depends on how you define CPD, but for me it is the personal learning you require to sustain, enhance and extend your own capabilities within your professional practice. This learning can come in many forms. My Personal Learning Network (PLN) is the vehicle that carries me to this learning, and social media is the highway that enables me to get there. All of my learning right now, at this stage of my career, is self determined. It is informal by nature and is essentially conversational.
The dialogue I enjoy is accessed via my PLN, often through Twitter, but can also come from LinkedIn or Facebook, Google Hangouts or even YouTube and any number of other of the social media platforms I use. What strikes me most about learning through PLN conversations is that the topics are always fresh, the discussions are on point, and the subsequent outcomes continue the learning process, through blogging, videos and other activities, leading to further dialogue. Blogging as conversation is increasingly popular and there are now numerous global chats on Twitter, many of which identify themselves with exclusive hashtags. Here's a short video I made about three reasons why Twitter is important for educators.
This is Learning 2.0, learning that involves self determined forms of education, the creation of new content, peer production of learning, and of course the widespread sharing of this back into the global community of learning. This ever virtuous circle of learning as dialogue through creating and sharing is what has propelled countless numbers of communities of practice to higher levels of understanding, and is a valid template to also apply to the compulsory education sectors and other formal learning ecologies.
We don't know what the future will bring us, but we can be sure that this kind of learning will continue and will gather impetus, discovering new ways to do things, new ideas to apply, new explanations, and of course - new people to connect with and with whom to enjoy new conversations.
Photo by Ed323 on Wikimedia Commons
A little more conversation by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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