Stages of PLN Adoption

Last week while researching about PLNs (Personal Learning Networks) for our final project, I came across the following pictures on Flickr, titled the Stages of PLN adoption. 

It intrigued me so I searched more to find out who created it and if there was more information on these stages.

What I discovered is that Jeff Utrecht, who writes a blog The Thinking Stick, wrote a blog post about the stages, in it he lists the 5 stages as:

1. Immersion: Immerse yourself into networks. Create any and all networks you can find where there are people and ideas to connect to. Collaboration and connections take off.
2. Evaluation: Evaluate your networks and start to focus in on which networks you really want to focus your time on. You begin feeling a sense of urgency and try to figure out a way to “Know it all.”
3. Know it all: Find that you are spending many hours trying to learn everything you can. Realize there is much you do not know and feel like you can’t disconnect. This usually comes with spending every waking minutes trying to be connected to the point that you give up sleep and contact with others around you to be connected to your networks of knowledge.
4. Perspective: Start to put your life into perspective. Usually comes when you are forced to leave the network for awhile and spend time with family and friends who are not connected (a vacation to a hotel that does not offer a wireless connection, or visiting friends or family who do not have an Internet connection).
5. Balance: Try and find that balance between learning and living. Understanding that you can not know it all, and begin to understand that you can rely on your network to learn and store knowledge for you. A sense of calm begins as you understand that you can learn when you need to learn and you do not need to know it all right now.

He states, "As you immerse yourself into the network your learning increases, the more you learn, the more you want to learn, the more immersed you become within the network. Until you reach a point that you understand the fundamentals of Web 2.0, the direction of Education, or whatever it is that interests you and you have in your PLN to begin with.
I also do not believe you have to go through all these stages. Some people jump from stage 2 to stage 5 or do not become so immersed into their PLN that they ever reach stage 3, that sense of having to “know it all.”

I think I'm currently in the perspective stage.   Due to current demands in both my personal and professional life I've had to pull back a little bit from the 24/7 feed of information.  I haven't looked at Twitter in several weeks and I'm only keeping up on blogs because I've set my feed reader up well.