Just Curious

A collaborative blog experimenting with community-based lifelong-learning and professional development

How to start your PLN on Twitter

Ytcaples

This morning I got an email that said that this person was following me on Twitter.  I noticed from the email that she had no followers and had posted no tweets.  Sometimes this can suggest suspicious behavior but I checked her out and saw that she was a legitimate colleague who is just getting started with Twitter, and I thought since she was going about it in the right way, she could help me prove a point. 

What’s she doing right?  She’s found the Twitter profiles of 11 colleagues and started following them.  These folks are:

·         Chris Betcher: http://twitter.com/betchaboy (gave a presentation at the 2009 K-12 Online conference)

·         Mark Pegrum: http://twitter.com/OzMark17 (author of From Blogs to Bombs)

·         Michael Wesch: http://twitter.com/mwesch (social anthropologist creator of “The Web is Using US”)

·         Jennifer Verschoor: http://twitter.com/jenverschoor (one of my co-moderators in EVO Multiliteracies)

·         Hannaa Khamis: http://twitter.com/hanaakhs (posts with acumen on various EVO sessions)

·         Vicki Davis: http://twitter.com/coolcatteacher (WoW Worldbridger and Cool Cat Teacher blogger)

·         Judy O’Connell: http://twitter.com/heyjudeonline (blogs at Hey Jude)

·         Larry Ferlazzo: http://twitter.com/Larryferlazzo (prolific “best” teaching sites blogger)

·         David Warlick: http://twitter.com/dwarlick (star education guru, presenter, and blogger)

·         Thomas Friedman: http://twitter.com/tomfriedman (author of The World is Flat – and subsequently crowded)

·         and Me: http://twitter.com/vances (how can she go wrong? ;-))

I’m sure she doesn’t know all of these people, but she’s started out in the right way.  She found a few twitterers she thought might have something to say, and now she has an 11 times chance of learning something interesting next time she logs on to the Internet.

And I’ve learned from her.  I thought she has impeccable taste, so I clicked on all the links above, and any that I wasn’t following already, I started following them.

So here is a small case-study of someone who has figured out the right way to develop a PLN, or Personal Learning Network.  I passed my cursor over Tom Friedman’s profile and took a screen shot, saved it to my computer, and then attached it to the email that I’m sending to post at my Posterous blog.  Now I’ll create a tweet directed @ytcaples http://twitter.com/ytcaples welcoming her to Twitter and pointing her to this post.

Aren’t PLN’s F.U.N.?