I thought about Personal Learning Networks (PLNs) the other day when I passed by the local newspaper, and started to wonder if the local reporters are building their PLNs for their continuous professional development. I haven’t really thought about PLNs before and how it could benefit me in my role as a university teacher and researcher. I spend a lot of time meeting colleagues around the world, for different reasons, but it seems like a natural part of the job, to have a lot of connections at universities around the world. And of course, times like now, all connections are digital. Online meetings, e-mails, messages and tweets…If someone would ask me if I learn from these, I would say absolutely. So, I wonder, is PLN always an active choice for learning or could it be more a social constant bringing learning as a side effect?

Anyhow, I passed by the local newspaper and wondered how often the reporters were connected to other reporters around the world. And if they would do it as an active choice to learn and develop their own journalistic trade. If I had stayed in the business, I would probably build my own PLN with reporters around the world. I would love to do that! Probably for the reasons of feeling connected to something greater than just the local environment. And while thinking this, an old memory popped up in my head. This was just after the Soviet Union had been dissolved in 1991, and I worked as a local reporter at a newspaper in a town on the coastline of the Baltic Sea. One day I had a visitor, a journalist from Kaliningrad. She was making her first study trip to Sweden with the aim to find out about how journalists worked across the water. She gave me her business card. I always regretted that I didn’t try to keep in touch with her. It was of course much harder before the Internet and social media.  I would probably also had kept in touch with classmates from my journalism studies in Toronto, back in the 1980’s, if the world had been more connected 40 something years ago. So, this addresses the issue of taking the opportunity for life-long learning and staying connected despite space and geographical distances. Building PLN may be with looser or stronger ties, but important either way.