The 2012 PLN course is bowling along, with the 150 participants back to work this week after a break in formal coursework over the school holidays.
But in spite of the vacation, many people took the time to catch up or even work ahead, do extra reading and activities, and take part in one or more of our events.
Two catch-up sessions enabled anyone who was in town to drop into the computer lab in the State Library of Victoria to meet the PLN team and fellow participants in person, ask questions, and talk through the first few units of work.
We’ve tried a few different things this year, and amongst them was our first Tweetchat. About 20 participants on either Twitter itself or via Tweetchat, using a special hashtag (#VicPLN2012), asked and answered questions and then just chatted about their PLN experiences and tools they use in their schools.
Tweetchat allows you to participate in an online chat session but strips out all other Twitter chatter so you can concentrate on the one hashtag. It also makes life a little easier by inserting the hashtag into your messages automatically, to help you tweet faster (other services such as Today’s Meet are similar and very handy): some tweetchats move so fast it’s hard to keep up with the one conversation, let alone seeing off-topics tweets as well.
If you use HootSuite, you can save the topic as a stream: we’ve embedded ours in the PLN blog, so you can see what happened and how the chat worked.
We also used Storify to curate a summary:
The next few units in the PLN course include the hot topics of mobile use, digital citizenship and online footprints. We’ll feed the discussion back into Bright Ideas for your input too.