There are different tools and social media platforms that you might use to build your PLN. Leveraging the affordances of digital technologies means that the tools and activities you can engage with and use to build your learning network can take on vastly different forms. You might share something you have authored within your network and get feedback on what you have done from a variety of perspectives. Or you might be inspired by a provocative blog post that someone else in your network has posted. Or you might put out a call for collaborators on a new project, or join a group discussion, or re-mix someone else’s work as a way of extending their ideas (and the conversation about it). While digital technologies are not required for these learning activities to happen, they enable you to engage with them in novel and more expansive ways.

You might look for specific venues where you can build your PLN, like conferences, or you might join social media groups related to your discipline to get started. We’ve already seen how tools like Twitter or Mastodon can be particularly valuable for building a personal learning network, and this is re-iterated in this video by ‘Common Sense Education’:

Visit the ‘Building your PLN’ discussion forum to share strategies that you have found useful in cultivating and expanding your PLN.

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