Part 1: Professional learning network
If we give a minute and think about PLN then I think we all agree that we start developing PLN the day we started school and since then it keeps growing every year. Now it includes colleagues from our previous and current work and many people outside work. This network has helped all of us to learn and develop new skills. Thanks to modern age technology Facebook, link din and many more we can link to social networks and as well as professional learning networks at any time.
Being in IT profession one of the main disadvantage is that you always have to keep yourself update. Technology that you are using today will be outdated in coming years and will be replaced by something better. If you want to stay in profession then you have to learn the new technology. Having said that it’s almost impossible to remember that how each tool work and how to configure it. For this reason we IT professional heavily rely on PLN. I started using online professional learning network, when I was working as network engineer. At that time we were implementing some new technology at our organization. As it was new we don’t have any experience in it and we were looking for help. I joined an online community of professionals and got answers from experts all around the world.
PLN that I am currently part of are link-din, Oracle, Microsoft and Cisco online communities. HCT colleagues are also part of my PLN. I have learned a lot from these personal leaning networks. Professional vendor network have help me in understanding new technologies and how to implement them. PLN at HCT helped me in teaching and delivering my courses. Every semester we have to teach two to three new courses and with help PLN we can share our materials with each other and don’t have to reinvent the wheel again. For example this semester twenty different teachers in different colleges are teaching accounting course. Instead of each teacher making course project with the help of PLN we all decided and to develop a common project.
Part 2: Technology and Course
I have chosen business semester one course Management and Leadership for this project. The technology that I will use in this course will be either Camtasia or Screencast-o-matic. I have used Camtasia three to four years back to show users how to configure their mailbox. I haven’t used it to deliver a proper class lecture. I think this is right time when I can use this technology to create my lectures so that students can access them to have better understanding of the concepts.
