Open online spaces of professional learning: Context, personalisation and facilitation

This article explores professional learning through online discussion events as sites of communities of learning. The rise of distributed work places and networked labour coincides with a privileging of individualised professional learning. Alongside this focus on the individual has been a growth in informal online learning communities and networks for professional learning and professional identity development. An example of these learning communities can be seen in the synchronous discussion events held on Twitter. This article examines a sample of these events where the interplay of personal learning and the collaborative components of professional learning and practice are seen, and discusses how facilitation is performed through a distributed assemblage of technologies and the collective of event participants. These Twitter based events demonstrate competing forces of newer technologies and related practices of social and collaborative learning against a rhetoric of learner autonomy and control found in the advocacy of the personalisation of learning.