How to cultivate a personal learning network: Tips from Howard Rheingold really helps to understand some tips and tricks to feeding you PLN. To start off, Howard Rheingold is a critic, writer, and teacher. He specializes in cultural, social and political implications of modern communication. Rheingold has multiple different articles and provides more tips on his Twitter! (@hrheingold if you wanna follow him) However, this article is not written by him but by Chuck Frey who discusses the 8 thoughts on how to build your social network. If you wanna check out all 8 you can click HERE but I will be only talking about a few.
The first tip I want to talk about is tip #4: “Always keep tuning your network, dropping people who don’t gain sufficiently high interest; adding new candidates”. This is a very important process of your PLN. When using your PLN you want to learn from it, L=Learning. There are so many inactive accounts on a variety of social medias. With these people being inactive, you are not learning anything from them. It is important to know who and what you are following. Another big concern is fake accounts. This has become growingly popular with “news” networks! I found one a couple days ago that was displaying themselves as a news station but when you clicked their stories…there was no story! The link took you to an inactive or different story than the one you clicked. It is all a matter of doing some research to have an efficient PLN.
The next tip I want to bring up is #5: “Feed the people you follow if you come across information that you suspect would interest them”. One way we are able to learn is by others and being able to share information. This has becoming so easy in social media! With one click, you can share any post with your followers or friends. This is something I do everyday. I am almost positive I tag my sister in a post that has to do with crafts or just to bring a smile to her face.
From reading How to cultivate a personal learning network, these are the two tips I have found the most helpful. All 8 tips are informative and will improve anyones PLN. Just remember, your PLN is what you make it! If you don’t wanna follow these tips, you don’t have to because it is YOURS!
Until next time,
-Rachel
Rachel's Mind 
It seems like there were so many great tips, hints, and ideas in this article! I love the idea of dropping people who aren’t helping you grow and learn. I think this is often forgotten, I definitely wouldn’t have known it. But by constantly tweeking and perfecting your network you’ll be able to better become an expert in your PLN.
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I agree. Anyone that is new to PLN should definitely check this article out!
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What great tips on building a good PLN! I think number four is an excellent tip, and I’ve already been putting it to use on Twitter.
#4: “Always keep tuning your network, dropping people who don’t gain sufficiently high interest; adding new candidates”.
I’ve seen some of the content posted by teachers/principals I am following and it’s caused me to drop maybe 3 of them because it’s info I just don’t want my feed filled with. I’ve also added new ones due to shares from other people that I follow. I can see that I’ll likely continue to add and remove people with my PLN to make it stronger and more focused on what my PLN is about, which is elementary education.
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I’ve noticed that too. Some people I followed are just inactive and it doesn’t really help me learn so it is best to unfollow.
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