Building PLNS in the Twitterverse

If you follow a ton of people or have a large following on Twitter, you are not necessarily learning anything or gaining any professional development experience. There has to be some sort of meaning and method to the madness, or else we are actually doing ourselves a disservice. One must have a solid plan, goals, and a purpose if they want to gain benefits from the Twitterverse and develop a PLN.

In developing my PLN, I am striving to find specific subject matter experts, relevant and useful content, and working to make sure that the information is efficiently organized in a manner that is personally useful to me. I want the content to be accessible and meaningful and I want the wheat separated from the chaff. I came across a journal article written by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach that has some good tips for building up a PLN on Twitter.

Sheryl states that is important to use one single username across different networks so that you can easily build up an online reputation and personal identity. She claims that it is also prudent to find a mentor to offer you guidance along the way. She suggests that once you find someone that is an authority on the specific subject matter you are looking into, you should investigate who they are following and then even look into who their followers are following. You can find trustworthy and reputable information more readily using this strategy and build up a more relevant and helpful network in less time. Sheryl also suggests to actively work to build your PLN up to be very different from yourself – diversity is key. You want to branch out and create a diverse and eclectic network filled with people who hold all sorts of different backgrounds and worldviews. I thought that these tips were great for this project and I am using her advice.

Sheryl also provides some advice for following hashtags. She states that it is best to use them as aggregation tools. She explains how to use hashtags for building up professional development and tracking information. She created this ‘TwitterGuide for Teachers’ which I personally thought was helpful - I wanted to share this gold with the rest of you. Check it out if you have time!

Nussbaum-Beach, S. (2013). Just the Facts: PLNS. Phi Delta Kappan, 94(7), 16-17. doi:10.1177/003172171309400705