Week 10 Professional Learning Community

Until very recently a Professional Learning Community (PLC) was something I felt I have moved past, yes before the days of the Internet there were things called Bulletin Boards which people would use to share downloaded updates, bug fixes, and utilities.  They were the life-line for people living or working with computers.  When I first began teaching I had classmates that I met when converting my BS degrees in Accounting and Management Information Systems to secondary education with a k-12 computer certification.  Now, I had a new different focus to my PLC, education comprised of several students in the same program meeting 2 nights a week for 18 months.  When I began teaching there was an opportunity to teach a college level networking class at the high school where I worked.  There was an excited yes from me on that request!   The Instructor’s class met daily for 7 weeks during the summer at Pease Trade Center, so I again blended into a new PLC for Cisco Networking. The nice thing about these communities is once accepted you always belong.

Reflection on PLCs has confirmed my want and need for a technical PLC entity.  Most of you are unaware that in the last 3 weeks I have been infected by 2 worms, hosted a Botnet, and lastly a malware attack.  Those of you unfamiliar with a botnet, check out the Kaspersky article, The Botnet Business. It is a pain in the butt!!!!

These formidable adversaries have costs me hundreds of hours during the crunch time of our class, nearing the end.  What I realized is that my PLC needs to save me from the hours and stress associated with this type of invasion.  Yes, I do have resources and protection, using Kaspersky as my protections program.  Yeh, I know some protection, but the same thing happened with Norton’s endpoint, McAffee, and Sophos protection engines. The root of the problem is that the botnet is within the school system when it attacks a PC it locks it up forcing a hard boot.  When the machine restarts it launches and embeds into the startup file before the protection engines start.  The only reasonable work around for the problem is a product called Deep Freeze which will freeze the hard drive and the boot sector to prevent unauthorized programs and or files.  Actually Faronics has a wide range of products many are ideal for education and computer labs.

Sorry, I have spent so much time researching my invasion I am sounding like the geek from many, many moons ago  (When you are a computer major, geek is good). There is a huge value to PLC's and they don’t just need to be work related even if the P is for Professional.  The P could just as easily mean Personal as with both my daughters who married last fall,  I am their PLC when it comes to cookingJ  I think society has always had these learning communities only they didn’t utilize technology.  I’m thinking that, those old fashion sewing circles were probably a PLC……