How can educators develop their own knowledge to use ICT to foster independent learning, and to facilitate deeper thinking and meaningful learning? I will share my own experience as an independent learner and educator.As a grad student engaged in independent study online through Athabasca University, and as an adult literacy college instructor, I develop connections for my own PLE (Personal Learning Environment) and develop my own use of ICTs to share resources, build a network, and engage in self-regulated, autonomous learning to accomplish a number of goals.I blog using WordPress, migrating useful posts from my other edublogs that are safely behind closed learning spaces within institutional LMS's. I blog by posting podcasts and documents using posterous.com. I use pageflakes to aggregate content on a specific subject, for myself, my colleagues, and for students, combining flakes that include RSS feeds, videos, podcasts, and a link to my own wordpress blog, as well as delicious bookmarks.I have collected more than 60+ annotated bookmarks on a number of online technologies using delicious.comI use bloglines, an RSS feed aggregator that provides me with updates for up to 40 blogs on various education topics. These blogs have a wide variety of embedded links, trackbacks, blogrolls, and recommended links for me to follow through on.I use a number of open academic journals to track current trends in educational technologies.I use specialized online databases from two post-secondary institutions to engage in online searches for full-text documents from online journals and e-books.What helps me facilitate my own deeper thinking and meaning-making is deliberate sense-making: coming up with schemas that aid me in organizing my ideas so that annotated bookmarks, for example, become imbued with greater meaning, so that with each additional iteration of the schemas, I return to earlier content and re-interpret them again.I have found that the process of sense-making has become an independent, often solitary, process. Despite much talk about the virtues of collaborative learning. not enough emphasis is made on the main source of meaningful learning: the individual's role to sustain and persist in one's own efforts as an autonomous, self-regulated learner, determining one's own goals and adjusting one's own strategies to alter self-construal and performance. Sense-making requires learners to become comfortable in one's own networked, connected learning space, while also engaging in a wide number of other learning spaces. For me, writing and creating ideas critically and honestly, while capturing more and more one's personal thinking processes, offers tremendous potential for self-knowledge, which can be shared with others. Every act of learning involves a creative process that involves the self (past, present, and potential) which needs to be openly given in a spirit of giving, of reciprocity, and of authenticity. Engaging in conversation with others is an extension of how one learns to talk to self: both aspects are intertwined. Recognizing the importance of the act of sense-making and sense-giving to deeper thinking and meaningful learning opens the way to transformative, lifelong learning.