Month: February 2023

Having previously built and sold personal computers, I have some experience in using social media to launch a campaign of sorts. In this specific market, it’s far less important who I am as an individual when looking to engage with the community compared to other communities. The most important part is being upfront with the computer that is being sold. Listing specifications in detail and accurately is the best way to make a good impression. I would make posts on social media made for buying/selling/trading such Facebook Marketplace, Kijiji, and EBay, and I would make sure that I was quick to reply to people asking questions about the computers and people who were expressing interest in buying them. I was able to build connections with people that reached out in response to my ads, because I was selling locally within my neighborhood, and I would also often install the PC in their house and set it up for them, as well as give the older folks that were buying the computers I was building some brief lessons on the technology. Being professional at the outset when people didn’t really know me and then transitioning to a more personable approach once I had established a rapport with my customers allowed for me to establish firm connections for people who would come back to me later on if something broke down or if they knew someone else who was interested in buying a computer. The most important part, though unintended at the time, was that I was actually establishing a PLN with these customers of mine. The questions that they would ask, as well as the recommendations and requests they would make of me when we were discussing the computers taught me a lot about how people learn about technology, especially those of older generations. I was able to apply this knowledge in my interactions when I was looking to sell to people in the future in order to help them make a more informed decision and to help clear up any confusion when it came to all the technical jargon that computers make use of.
Though not directly applicable in the example of my experience outlined above, I think that it is very important to engage with any existing community around the topic that is chosen for the social media campaign, not just because making use of that pre-existing community can save a lot of time and energy, and help spread the network and campaign further, but also because it is the respectful thing to do; greeting people that are already in a space that you are moving into is just the courteous thing to do, and not doing it may and up severely hampering the campaign that is being ran, since you might end up at odds with the pre-existing community otherwise.

Explore the videos provided and reflect on the themes of a PLN in professional capacity.

PLNs are a very valuable resource and source of lifelong learning that can provide and empower connections to help propel people forward in both their careers and personal lives. As written last week in my blog post, when using PLNs as a professional resource, people have to act professionally, following the (often unwritten, though sometimes explicit) social rules that “professionalism” within their profession dictates. This often means that people have to pay more attention to the language they use, the people they choose to associate with, the way they present themselves and their work, and more. In my (admittedly limited) experience, professional connections can also be colored by a certain kind of transactionalism, where people expect that others share and provide value to their network just as much as they receive value from it, though this isn’t always the case.

Which social media platforms are beneficial in education?

As I have said before, I think that there is value in almost every social media for some kind of connection building to expand a PLN. Similarly, I think that almost every platform has the capacity to be beneficial in education, at least within informal education. The infographic slides of instagram, well-planned, nuanced and interactive twitter threads, or (my personal favourite) the 2 hour video essay on youtube. 

I have written a lot about youtube as an educational tool in previous education classes, but it remains one of my favourite ways to learn. I have been able to explore lectures in subjects that I don’t have the time to take here at UVIC with MIT’s OCW, deepened my understanding of topics that I already have covered in university with supplementary short lectures from independent creatures like 3blue1brown, and explored things like the intersection of pop culture, sociology and politics in maaaany video essays from creators such as Skip Intro, PhilosophyTube, and Michael Saba, to name a few of my recent favourites. The ability for anybody to create a polished video lecture/essay/work of any topic and upload it freely to youtube makes it an invaluable tool in my education, and I have learned an immense amount of mathematics, philosophy, political science, sociology, computer science, and more that I wouldn’t have otherwise discovered.

When working with the vulnerable sector, how does social media fit into professionalism and regulations?

Aside from the obvious (i.e. do not post pictures of or information regarding another person without their explicit consent, do not engage in any behaviour that leads to the harming of another person, i.e. harassment) there are additional factors to consider when working with the vulnerable sector. Seemingly innocuous photos may have the geolocation they were taken embedded within them, which could cause issues for the people within the vulnerable sector or the organization that an individual is working with, or a staff member’s unprofessional instagram posts may impact the organization’s reputation and ability to get funding, for example. When working within the vulnerable sector, it is important for people, educators and otherwise, to be very professional in their presentation and hypervigilant in their privacy and security in order to minimize potential harm.

My V and R map:

What digital platforms are students currently using to develop their professional network?

When looking at some of the VandR maps made by other students of the class, there certainly do seem to be a few repeated platforms, with Brightspace and Zoom as platforms that pop up the most to my eye. However, when we take into account the sampling bias of these maps, i.e. that they were all made by students that are electing to take a course about learning using social media platforms, I don’t think that we can be confident in applying any conclusions drawn from that dataset to the wider student body. Instead, I want to discuss this topic more generally. 

I think that the digital platforms students are currently using varies wildly between students, with some overlap/subcultures based on what kind of work that professional networking is going to be doing. As I have discussed previously, while Discord and Instagram are often not thought of as social media that can be used for professional networking, they are the go-to’s for people that I know that are involved in gaming content creation and fashion respectively. I have also heard from a friend of Discord as being prominent for people who are seeking employment in programming for indie games, as well as profiles on some coding practice/puzzle sites such as Leetcode or HackTheBox being used in employment for other coding jobs. I can only speak to what people I know are doing, and I may be missing very large parts of what is actually going on due to my own social circles’ political or cultural biases and blind spots. I have had others tell me that I need to get a robust Linkedin/Twitter/Facebook/whatever account to be employed, but when I asked the person who recommended Linkedin about Facebook they told me it really wasn’t that important in the end. Likewise to the person who recommended Facebook when I asked about Linkedin. From what I gather from these people I’ve spoken to and my understanding of the world, I would surmise that it would be best to maximize your odds by putting out as many different fleshed out profiles on as many different places for people to see as possible, since you never know for sure which one will be the one that may provide a meaningful opportunity.

So in essence, I think that I am not in the right position to answer truly and definitively as to what students use for their digital networking, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the answer turned out to be “Well, everything, really.”

What could the student consider in expanding their professional learning network?

The easy answer here is privacy, as there is a lot to be discussed in our society in the coming years about how we will reconcile privacy with our evermore interconnected, online, data-driven world, with a teeny tiny piece of that discussion to be happening below as I get to that question. However, I want to write about something different, since I think that many will be writing about privacy here and I will be writing on that topic as well later on in this post. 

As I have written above, students would probably be served well by the creation and maintenance of a litany of profiles on a wide variety of sites, but truth be told, that sounds completely exhausting, and frankly, alienating. Personally, I do not want to live my life for an audience. My life is meant to be lived for me, for my own personal enjoyment. Until it becomes a more pressing matter for me to begin to cultivate a professional online identity, I will be satisfied with the few small indicators that I exist that I have already created, plus or minus whatever I end up doing in the meantime for whatever work I pick up while I’m still in school. For me, a career is not and (hopefully) will not be something that I am, it is/will be something that I do. And when I am doing my career, I will not stop being me. Frankly, the purposeful cultivation of a professional identity, at least in the sense that I understand it as an unaccredited student who has had to make use of digital professional networking in a limited manner in order to find work over the summers, sounds painful. It reminds me of when I was younger and I had to work really hard to trim away all those parts of myself that didn’t fit the social expectations of someone of my demographic in order to fit in. I don’t want to cut away and hide parts of myself in order to present in the way that capitalism demands; as a perfect prim and proper worker, ready, if not eager, to become a cog in a machine and work myself to the bone to line someone else’s pockets with the value I and my coworkers create. Even when I am being employed, I want to be thought of and recognised as a fully human person, not as a machine to be used to raise productivity or increase a profit margin or to otherwise “bring value to the company.” Curating an identity that fundamentally isn’t the truth of who I am is something that I never want to have to do again. And so I won’t. And it’ll probably cost me some opportunities, maybe even a lot of opportunities, but I know I will be better off, happier, having done it my way. So overall, what could the student consider in expanding their professional learning network? I think that the best thing that I could say would be: “Be yourself, and have some fun with it.”

Thread Discussion: How do data privacy and security limit and promote a PLN? In your network, how can you create a digital identity/ reputation?

As I have discussed above, in what could be considered both a radical act of resistance or a naive act of self-sabotage, depending on who you ask, I have made the decision that I will not be working very hard to create a strictly professional digital identity; instead, I will have a digital identity that covers all the things I am and like and do, including my professional aspects of myself. In this sense, since I, as a person, do things online like play games with my friends, or interact with people on instagram or twitter, I create a digital identity and reputation by simply living my life. I post things that interest me; professionally, personally, or otherwise. In ways, this lack of purposeful privacy will impact my ability to promote my PLN, more below:

Here is what I wrote on the Mattermost discussion in direct reply to asiataryn:

“I think that this concept of privacy moderation that you discuss, (i. e opening up enough about yourself to make those connections, while not opening up so much as to be coming off too pushy or strong, and ending up putting people off), is something that is really interesting that not a lot of other people have touched on so far. I think that there is certainly something to this, about how too much privacy leads to connections not being made due to too much sheer social “distance”, while too little privacy can have a similar effect, with users breaking a kind of social taboo and putting other users off. Social media sites are often made to present a manicured version of ourselves, which as you note, people see as a reflection of the true self, but which simultaneously, as others have noted, is an act of role-playing; it’s performative. As such, people are expected to be performing a version of themselves that is supposed to be this version of themselves that is the best or most presentable, or perhaps more fundamentally, the version of themselves that they want to be perceived as by other users of that service. If user A sees user B doing things that don’t fit in with what user A expects others should be posting as part of performing their ideal professional self, then user A will reject user B’s performance. They see it as someone who isn’t able to act professionally, and thus isn’t able to bring anything of value to their PLN, or might even harm their PLN, since if a user C sees that user A has “followed” user B, and sees what user B does, then by following user B, user A has also demonstrated to user C that they are similarly failing to perform professionalism to user C’s standards, thus losing user A out on that connection even if user A hasn’t actually done anything wrong. In essence, a certain level of discretion and privacy are required to perform the professionalism that  PLN requires, but too much stifles the abilities to make connections since we never get to know anybody, since genuinely performing professionalism requires at least putting some of your true self into that performance.”

Consider in your blog submission how an employer would respond if you applied for a job with them and they assessed your social media presence via your digital identity.

I have already touched on this above, but as I said, for most employers, it would probably not be positive. A lot of anti-capitalist sentiment on there, as you could probably tell from my writing. That would definitely throw off a lot of potential employers, but hopefully there’ll still be a few that’ll look past it and realize that I am a good fit for whatever I am applying for, or perhaps some that might even see it as a benefit.