Project #10 Personal Learning Network

Since beginning Edm310 this semester, my PLN has vastly expanded. Many sites that I used to use purely for entertainment have become a major part of my learning experience. Youtube is an excellent example as it has been a very important source for many of my blog projects. While it is a great site to watch hilarious videos of people making fools of themselves, music videos, cartoons, and many other entertaining videos, there are many educational videos that have taught me a lot on various subjects. Blogger has also been an excellent resource. I really enjoy the C4T, C4C, and C4K assignments because it is interesting to read what other people have to say about the things they are passionate for. One of my favorite aspects about this class so far has been using twitter as an educational resource. I had already been familiar with tweeting as a social networking medium prior to taking this class and enjoyed it, but using it as a professional resource never really crossed my mind. The two aspects of Edm310 that I have unexpectedly enjoyed as well as expanded my PLN have been podcasting and the TED talks. I'm not a big fan of listening to speech's or lectures and most talk show programs tend to bore me fairly easily, but there have been some interesting videos and podcast to watch and listen to so far in this class. My favorite PLN resource however is Reddit.

Reddit is a blogging community where it's members post interesting and pertinent articles or self posts in specific categories. It is personalized in the sense that users can subscribe to the topics they like and block the ones that they don't. It has a great interface because all of the subjects you are interested in show up on the home page so you can just scroll down and explore the posts that catch your eye. You can also browse by the specific sub categories and either up vote or down vote posts based on if you liked it. It is a great PLN resource because it makes it very easy to jump into discussions on any topic and it's very organized. It also has its own mailing system for personal messages or general public comments. I use reddit to follow articles on science, technology, health, nutrition, fitness, psychology, sociology, and education. These categories that I follow barely scratch the surface of how many categories there are to follow as it truly is a website where everybody can find something they are interested in.