Technology Starting Points-A Riff on Ryan Bretag's Intersting Post

I read this post from Ryan Bretag this weekend and thought this group might have some additional insights on the post.

In the post Ryan was asked the following question:

If only one thing 'stuck' with the teachers this year, what do you hope it to be"?

His answer was (I promise to do more than paraphrase):

The one thing I want to stick this year, my major goal, is fostering the development and implementation of a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) for each teacher and administrator.

The form in which he hoped that the PLE took was that of an aggregator/feed reader/feed aggregator. Now I thought this was a cool idea and as a long time user of RSS readers, I absolutely recognize the power of these information organizers. With the advent of start pages, I think aggregators can be even more powerful....however what troubled me (and I commented as much) was that most teachers/administrators would have to be educated on the components that go into using an aggregator. First step is blogs (how do I find good ones? Do I really care? I don't have enough time to read them?), RSS (What is this?) and finally Aggregators (Sounds boring? Sort of an unwieldy word?) Now there is nothing wrong with educating someone on new things, but with so many issues and so little time, is it reasonable that a large percentage of teachers would get on board with an heretofore unknown tool.

So, my response was (admittedly self-serving, as you'll soon see) lets build personal learning environments from a common place or unit. PlansForUs, the company I founded, chose the lesson plan as the unit for sharing and building community around. Once teachers are using the community to build lesson plans, you could add other features like aggregators that can benefit from the community's ability to introduce one another to these new feeds, blogs, and ideas.

That said, I could be barking up the wrong tree, but I figure it's worth asking a smart group like you....how do you introduce teachers (generating viral growth and wide expansion) to the power of social technologies and Web 2.0? PlansForUs posits that it is through a known unit (the lesson plan) and as a solution to a known problem (generating new lessons) that a community can efficiently solve.