This is how personal learning networks work. When I first started using Second Life for education, I was helped by a teacher there, Kevin Jarrett, who I started following on the del.icio.us social bookmarking service. I use del.icio.us for social discovery -- that is, when I find someone knowledgeable about a topic that interests me, I add them to my social bookmarking network and I also look for the people whose bookmarks they often use -- their del.icio.us or diigo network, another great social bookmarking service. Through Kevin, I found Bud The Teacher. I follow both of them on Twitter. Last week, while scanning Twitter, I noted that Bud The Teacher was using a collaborative document creation application called EtherPad. I asked him via a publicly viewable tweet whether he had an example of students who used it, and within a minute, I heard from someone who I had not known previously, but who followed me on Twitter - a teacher who sent me a link to the Etherpad document edited collaboratively by her sixth grade class. So I contacted the 6th grade teacher, Meredith Stewart. As soon as I became aware of what she was doing, I was interested in hearing more from Stewart. She is willing to experiment with new tools, understands that facilitating student collaborative learning and fostering in each student a sense of individual agency as a learner, not technology for the sake of technology, are the important goals for technology-augmented classrooms.… more