As part of my work as Faculty Fellow of Online and Technology-Enhanced Learning at UMD, this semester I am leading a local cohort of the Educational Technology Workshop (ETW). The ETW is a six-week workshop series for UMN system faculty that explores emerging web tools and pedagogies.

For our second week, I prepared and led a Personal Learning Networks (PLNs) Workshop to help our participants explore the opportunities and challenges of networked learning. Through an engagement with the micro-blogging and social media service Twitter, the workshop demonstrates a series of key concepts for PLNs and social learning. Working with Twitter allowed us to leverage the “wealth” of our participant network and quickly learn about a range of new tools, interesting people, and information sources.