Not Your Father's PLN

I. Calling London

At first it was a bit disconcerting. My husband, son and I were driving from northern New Jersey to Washington D.C. to participate in the SOS March. From the back of the car I could hear my son talking. I turned and saw him hunkered down in the seat, wearing headphones and holding his phone. He was clearly chatting, not talking to himself.

Who are you talking to?


Tom.


Tom?


Yeah, Tom from London.

Tom from London is a 13 year old boy who plays Minecraft on my son's server. My son is 12. He and a half dozen boys, ranging from 9-years-old to 13-years-old, are avid players of Minecraft. The boys are from London, New Jersey, Russia, and Pennsylvania. In some important ways these boys are a PLN (Personal Learning Network), not that any of them would define themselves in such a manner. But they do learn from one another and do so based on a shared passion.

A few things my son says he has learned a lot about during the last few weeks his server has been up and running include: how to work with others, how to run a good server, how to explain installation process of mods, how to build together, how to give and take ideas, how to build from someone's idea, how to script, how to model, and how to resolve problems when they arise. During this learning, the boys are also learning about one another: siblings, where they live, currency, geography, and all things Minecraft. My son is adamant that this playing is not learning.

It's not like school, he tells me repeatedly.

Sadly, I think he's right.


II. Marking Time

I imagined my mom, deceased these last 11 years, along for the ride to DC and what she might have to say about the technology that allows a 12 year old while in a moving car in the United States to talk with a boy he has never met who is in London.

I can imagine her saying:

But Mary Ann, think of the cost. This must be quite dear.


Not really mom. He's skyping and it is free.

I mark time by death. My mother's passing in 2000 in many ways marks the ushering in of a world she would have delighted in, marveled at, and have been puzzled by--perhaps in the same breath. We live at a time when Internet technologies alter how we live--alter our very definitions of friendship and intimacy. My mom's friends were all people she knew. She would have had no trouble picking out a friend in a crowd. For me such definition no longer works. There are people I have "met" via Twitter who I have shared intimacies with and yet we have never physically met.  Alongside this new knowledge, I also recognize that there is a niggling distrust I carry with me of naming people I have met on line as friends.  This is a fear-based conditioning I am relinquishing as the conversations I have with these new friends morph, take on weight, allow me to adjust my schema.

For my son, the lines between physically meeting and meeting on line are inconsequential, not even a line to traverse. His idea of friend is not based on a singular reality. My son tells me he has no interest in limiting by definition what a friend is.  I push a bit and he says, A friend is someone who isn't mean, shares interests, and makes sense.   Age oddly isn't that important.

III. Seeing in the Dark

Last Tuesday during #EDCHAT, the idea of PLNs were discussed.

I wanted to suggest that the task may be for us, as educators, to recognize students' PLNs as being meaningful and to lean in and try to learn, especially from those learning networks based on student-determined passions and ones that may well reside outside of school. An important task is for us to relinquish definitions we have about learning and school. We need to look at things as they are. 

Wallace Stevens in "The Man with the Blue Guitar," tells us:

Throw away the lights, the definitions,
And say of what you see in the dark


That it is this or that it is that,
But do not use the rotted names.

Rotted names.  I think about this, about our trip to Save Our Schools March, and wonder if the one reform we must do is one that is more personal, less institutional.  What rotted names do we repeat that keep us stuck in a time long gone? How do we allow ourselves to peer in the dark and say what we see?

Surely some of the language we use at schools has rotted. Just as my definition of friendship needs to be updated, stretched, made more inclusive--so too do we need to acknowledge that our students' learning sources will most likely be beyond the purview of school. Internet-based technologies allow for personal learning in ways most of us could not imagine a decade ago. It is simply foolish to shut the door on these actual learning networks simply because they aren't institutionalized.

Our conversation about engendering student-based PLNs, must begin with us acknowledging that alternative learning networks our students already name as their own need to be privileged.