Sunday, May 11, 2008

The Power of Networks for Learning

I have just finished reading an article on how networking can be important for a manager´s career. This article made me think about the importance of networking for educator´s professional development as George Siemens suggested. As a teacher I have learned a great deal from my networks, from being conneted. My network keeps me current of new tools, trends, courses, and events. The list is endless if one stops to think about all the information we get through Facebbok, Yahoo groups, aggregators, blogs, wikis, and so on. As educators, we sometimes get really busy teaching and planning our classes and neglect network building and connecting to our peers in the teaching field. By doing this, we many times stop learning. This last realization made me ask myself a very relevant question: If as educators we do not continue learning, what kind of message are we sending to our students?

2 comments:

Bsl said...

Thats a good point. As teacher you should be skilled to facilitat students learning but also facilitat your own learning. You could say learning by doing learning :-)
I'm at the moment both a student (master degree)and a teacher. It's very inspirering to reflect on teaching and being taught.

joseantonio said...

Hello Bsl,
Thanks for your comments. We teachers are ethernal students, but this is certainly more evident when we are in a situation as you are: studying and teaching at the same time. This is a situation that certainly makes us reflect on teaching and learning.
All the best