ChoralTech: Who’s in Your Network

ChoralNet consistently strives to be the online professional network for us as choral conductors, and for ACDA in general. For many of us, myself included, we came to ChoralNet looking to ask questions, disuss new ideas, and learn from the experience of our peers. Beyond ChoralNet, though, there are many other ways to expand and develop your Professional Learning Network to include thought leaders and influential people in your areas of expertise and interest, be they performing, conducting, teaching, or anything else.

 

The idea of the Professional Learning Network comes out of traditional professional networking, with one new wrinkle: because of the rise of self-publishing and Web 2.0 platforms like blogging, Twitter, bookmarking and online chats, it’s very easy to quickly build a network of people to follow which will deliver information to you about the things in which you have an interest. There are many possible ways to build this network, each useful for gathering and sharing different types of resources, but let’s look at three easy and efficient ways to build a Professional Learning Network with your interests at the core: RSS, Social Networking, and Social Bookmarking.

 

RSS

 

The root of any digital learning network is RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication. Feel free to use that to impress at your next party. RSS is a service which allows you to subscribe to various blogs and websites that will send you an update everytime something is posted. For example, ChoralBlog is updated nearly every day, so you know that you can check it in the morning and see new information. What if you would like to follow an author who posts every few days? It’s time-consuming, and a little boring, to check that blog every day to see if there’s something new. An RSS reader will simply collect all new updates to any blog that you follow and post them for you. This way, you can see all of the new updates in your blog subscriptions and read them in one place.

 

There are many great RSS readers available. Most mail clients (Apple Mail, Outlook, etc.) have a feature to add RSS feeds into your mailbox so that you’ll see updates with your e-mail. Dedicated RSS websites allow you to read your RSS feeds online. If you have a tablet (iPad, Android or Kindle NOOK), I highly recommend Flipboard, which is a very nice free RSS reader.

 

Once you have your reader, it’s very easy to add blogs to it: whenever you find a website or blog that you would like to receive updates from, simply click the RSS icon (the orange icon above) to add the blog to your subscription. Extra Credit: Where’s the ChoralBlog RSS icon?

 

Social Networking

 

Professionals using social networking have a challenge: is the network for personal use, professional use, or both? In the early days of social networking, people used sites like Facebook and Twitter for both personal and professional use. While the ability to control privacy has improved slightly in the last few years, this can still lead to embarrasing mistakes like the family Thanksgiving picture (with you sleeping in the easy chair) getting sent out to your professional network. To keep it clean, I recommend a system that many Professional Learning Network users are coming to: Facebook for Friends, Twitter for Work. I discussed using Twitter for Choirs in an earlier post (https://choralnet.org/390381), so I’ll keep it short here, only to say that if you’re not using Twitter for your professional and artistic development, you’re missing out on a lively discussion and exchange of ideas. Just remember what Meg Ormison, a great Twitter-fied Teacher says: It’s professional only. The minute you start telling me what you had for lunch, I’m dropping you!

 

Social Bookmarking

 

RSS and Social Networking are great ways to tap into the information stream and get connected with resources that are interesting to you. Once you have them, though, what do you do with them? Social Bookmarking sites let you build a library of useful articles, resources and webpages so that you can access them at any time. The social aspect of them is that you can choose to share them with the world, so people can see your digital bookshelf.

 

Once you’ve built your Professional Learning Network, you’ll want to be able to save things that you discover. Pinterest is a website which allows you to save articles, although it’s more useful for lots of images. I’ll be honest in that while Pinterest seems to be the social bookmarking flavor of the month these days, I don’t find it particularly useful. I recommend two mainstays and one fun alternative: Scoop.It and Diigo are the gold standard in social bookmarking. Both allow you to collect and tag/categorize your links, and share them as you so wish (or not share certain ones, like your recipe folder).

 

My favorite, though, is Pearltrees. This allows you to organize your bookmarks graphically into “pearls,” which are categories and subcategories. You can add other people’s pearls if there are us with whom you would like to collaborate. It’s fun, pretty to look at, and much easier (to my mind) to organize than traditional text-based alternatives.

 

What about you?

 

Once you have your network, explore and see what connections develop! With ChoralNet as a core of your Professional Learning Network, you can expand to include any number of great resources. Who is in your Professional Learning Network? Who do you share/follow/collaborate with digitally, and how?