I kind of fell into the world of personal learning networks. I didn’t know, back in 2005, that I was curating a group of professionals with whom I would exchange ideas, or that it would become the most valuable professional learning experience of my career. I just knew that there were interesting people talking about challenging ideas, and that the things they were struggling with were the same things I was struggling with. So maybe we could help each other.

I started with blogs and podcasts, and eventually added Twitter. Those three tools did two very different things. They gave me a way to consume others’ ideas. I could read blog posts, listen to podcasts, and follow Twitter feeds. And, they gave me a way to share my ideas with others. Informally, that included blog comments and tweeting, but I was soon curating my own blog and I eventually had a podcast, too. So I was both consuming others’ ideas and sharing ideas of my own.

But the interesting thing, in hindsight, is that this was all asynchronous. The people I was paying attention to were not the same people who were paying attention to me. While there was certainly a lot of overlap, my teachers and my students were not necessarily the same people. So I read the blogs of lots of people who didn’t read mine. I listened to many podcasts and followed a lot of Twitter accounts managed by people who didn’t follow me. That was okay. I didn’t take it personally. I focused on the stuff that was relevant to me, and I expected everyone else to do the same thing.

Those three tools, though, are basically dead. Blogging is a shell of its former self. Even I have to struggle with sharing something new each month, and I used to make 100 posts per year. Podcasts have become such professional productions that a homegrown “press record and just start talking” kind of approach wouldn’t get any traction today. And Twitter has become such a cesspool of hate and misinformation that I can’t use it anymore.

If I were trying to replicate the kind of network that I had 15 years ago, I’m not sure how I would do it. Nearly all of the tools now require both people to be friends or contacts or members of the same group. And we have those things. There are Slack communities, and Discord groups, and Google groups. Some people use LinkedIn. Others go old school and rely on email lists. But all of them suffer from the same problem. The producers and consumers of content are the same people. That’s great for collaboration, but it’s not so great when different people are in different places on their journeys, or if their interests and challenges don’t exactly align.

How do you share things with one group of people, and consume things shared by a different group? Are there new tools and strategies that foster this kind of network curation?