Teachers Networked Knowledge Activities in PLNs

In terms of teachers' participation in personal learning networks, I was curious about what criteria teachers have when they share knowledge in personal learning networks (PLNs) for professional development. Teachers search for information and decide to share what they find in the myriad of knowledge on the web. But I thought it is not clear why they decide to share the knowledge and what factors they have related to their professions in those networked knowledge activity process. However, at this moment, I started thinking of a different question. Because I came across that we do not know about the teachers' networked knowledge activities in PLNs, which mean that we need to understand teachers' networked knowledge activities in PLNs first before we explore the specific phenomenon. The idea of identification of teachers networked knowledge activities in PLNs is from an article I read this week.

Educational usage of social media was the topic of this week. Among assigned articles, I was really enjoyed reading Dr. Dennen’s article about networked knowledge activities. I have mainly read teachers' information seeking behaviors or information behaviors to find answers to my research questions. While searching related articles, I was considering relationships between education and information behavior because information behavior looked too broad and far from educational activities.

On the other hand, networked knowledge activities coined by Dr. Dennen was so clear and connected to educational situations. It was so impressive that the classification of networked knowledge activities was so precise and useful. Furthermore, those concepts helped to elaborate on my research questions.

The question that I turned to was how teachers show their networked knowledge activities in personal learning networks? If I collect data via interviews with teachers who engage in PLNs, the concepts may be used as the theoretical framework; collect, curate, share, broker, negotiate, and construct. I believe this initial exploration can connect to another research question.