It’s like attending a meeting at
work, only better, because the traditional barriers of geography, background, language and culture become transparent.

Personally & socially maintained semi-synchronous connections.
For networked learners, these are conversations that are not exactly conversations. They may be questions directed toward a single friend or associate, but more likely they are sent out to a community of people who, because of their interests, expertise, or perspectives, are in a position to help you do your job. Semisynchronous refers to the idea that collaboration doesn’t have to happen in real time. Not only can the collaborators be geographically distant, but they can also participate in a discussion when it works best for their schedules, regardless of time zones or office hours. The tools you can use to build and grow this type of network include mailing lists, wikis, Google Docs, Twitter, group discussion boards and comment walls in Facebook, and commenting on blogs, among others.

Dynamically maintained asynchronous connections. The first two types of PLN connect us with each other, but this type more often connects us with content sources that we have identified as valuable. The central tool for dynamically maintained asynchronous connections is the RSS aggregator.