Teachers' Experience of Professional Learning Through Personal Learning Networks

Abstract

There is an urgent need to improve continuing professional learning for teachers as education becomes increasingly complex. Traditional models of professional development are often fragmented, discrete events, disconnected from teachers' practice and perceived as empty measures of compliance. There is limited research that investigates alternative professional learning approaches that leverage online social technologies and involve teacher agency, collaboration and active participation. Therefore, this research explores teachers' experience of professional learning through personal learning networks (PLNs). The findings have supported the development of a new model of learning as a connected professional, which makes a significant contribution to theory and practice in the emerging field of professional networks and learning, enabled through the affordances of social technologies.