The Power of a PLN (alternately titled "My Biggest Blonde Moment Ever")

Friday, March 19th 2010 started out as a great day.  It was day 2 of the fantastic Teacher2Teacher Conference in Bow Island, AB (#t2t2010 for all you tweeps).  Despite there having been snow the night before, the sun was out, the air was warm and spring was definitely on its way.


Having presented 3 sessions at the conference on Thursday, I had met many great educators and fellow members of my Twitter PLN -- @fiteach and @MacHarvey to name just two.  My last session was set to take place at 2:00 pm on Friday, so I planned to spend the morning and early afternoon sitting in on other sessions and meeting other members of my virtual PLN.  This included attending @rmbyrne's "Developing PLNs (Personal Learning Networks) Through Social Networks" session Friday afternoon.

As I anticipated, @rmbyrne (a valuable member of my Twitterverse PLN) did a fantastic job demonstrating and explaining how awesome social networking sites can be for educators looking to both give and receive excellent tips, tricks, resources and ideas.  I even got the chance to meet another member of my Twitter PLN @langwitches.

During this discussion, I did a quick search of my full name on Twitter "Vanessa Cassie" to see if there were any other twitter accounts under this name that might confuse people looking for me.  I found 2 accounts -- my current professional one and an old personal one that I hadn't touched in nearly a year.

I decided that it was best to delete my old, inactive account so as not to confuse anyone whom I may meet through future conferences and pd sessions...so I went up to the "Settings" section of my account and selected "deactivate my account".  I was given the following warning:

"No biggie" I thought -- I only had a few close friends following me on my personal account, so I wasn't concerned about letting them know to start following me on my professional one.  And so...I hit...delete...

*Wham!*

I had a sudden sinking feeling as it dawned on me that I had never actually signed out of my professional account prior to the deactivation which might mean...

NOOOOOOO!

I hastily hit the 'home' button to take me back to my twitter feed and was greeted with the following message:

Oh. My. God.

There was no way that I could have just accidentally deleted my Twitter account...but sadly, it was true.  Despite great support from those in the workshop, and numerous emails to Twitter support, it was determined that nothing could be done to salvage my @VanessaCassie account.  To add insult to injury, I kept getting an email response with that original screenshot reminding me that I was warned prior to choosing to deactivate my account.  Like I needed to be reminded over and over!



There I was, faced with the daunting challenge of starting over from scratch.  How on earth was I ever going to rebuild? What about the great people 700+ people that I had met through various #edchats, #t2t2010 and #followfridays?  How was I going to access my favourited tweets that I hadn't yet had a chance to fully explore? How was I going to reconnect with participants from past pd days?

It was at that moment that I realized just how much I had come to rely on the support, information, resources and discussions that my PLN offered.  It was a true wake up call and testament to just how valuable these daily tidbits and debates were and how much of an integral part of my life they had become. I suddenly was walking proof that Twitter was not just a constant stream of status updates, but a source for answers to questions I had and a place to share information pertinent to technology in education.


I decided that there was no time to waste in rebuilding my Twitterverse, so I created a new account @VanessaSCassie and started by following a few key contacts that I had conversed with many times.  I sent out the following plea:

Within one hour, thanks to the amazing generosity and viral nature of Twitter, my plea had been re-tweeted 33 times and I had slowly begun to rebuild with 50 followers. On a Friday night!  The kindness and concern continued, with so many wonderful tweeps sending me words of condolences and vowing to keep spreading the word.  I also received many comments that my devastation was not in vain that I was a lesson to others to always be cautious of online actions and to be thankful for their own participation in our online PLN.

The moral of my story is this:

Words cannot begin to describe just how valuable an online Personal Learning Network can be.  For those of you reading this who have not yet begun your own journey of building a PLN I strongly encourage you to do so.  For those educators who have started the process, let this story be a reminder to you of how many great things can come from the support, kindness and willingness to share of our online friends around the world.  At the time of this blog post, a mere 4 days after my virtual world collapsed, I'm nearly halfway to rebuilding the connections that I thought I had lost.

A huge "thank you" to the hundreds of people who have RT-ed, re-followed and reinforced my belief in the power of my PLN.

@VanessaSCassie

(formerly known as @VanessaCassie)