edci338

Reflect on your experience in the course, your development of PLN, your use of social
media platforms and networked publics, any changes in your perspective of social media
in professional settings and personal use.

the course had gave me an overall feeling that it had really focused on a new approach in developing learning method in the digital social media, it dig deep to search for ways to gain knowledge and educational influence by emering in the educational plateform and how to build yourself with the approporiate method in growing social medias. Personally I have used my social media and developed it as a learning plateform, I started to follow a variety of topics that are for building my PLN, and i have joined topic specific communities to learn and build connection with it by sharing relevent feed in the communities. The changes that have happened to my pespective is that you view social media as not only something you use to interact with people for means of socialization, but something that you have an identity of as a student or as a teacher over others to learn, this is just like a school, except it is a learning platform and the method of learning is different. Before I have always thought social media does not have any influence on your life outside of social circle, after approaching PLN, i have noticed that social media is something that can absolutely connect yourself to the outside world and can make you grow as a person as well as impacting others thru the insights and information you have shared. Therefore instead of just sharing and focusing on more of my own stuff and only focusing what is going on in my own little circle, i’ve felt like i needed to put my sight far out and learn from the surrounding environment and keep in mind that the things I shared can have an impact not only to the private social circles that I have, but also could be meaningful to the broader social circles around me. At the end, we love in a society that everyone is connected by knowledge and things that had been going kn around us, we can synchronize ourself to communicate on the same channel based on these facts, and promoting connection and communications thru sharing knowledge should be a new way people make connections with one another thru social media.

EDCI 338 Final Project Outline

The Final Project reflects 40% of your final mark.

Team Working Contract:

• Establishing team procedures
  • Talk to each other via Mattermost chat or on zoom.
• Identifying expectations
  • Each group member is expected to complete their assigned parts before the deadline on November 23rd. 
• Timelines and milestones
  • Try to finish the rough draft by November 22nd to leave enough room to revise and edit the final version by November 23rd. 
• Specifying the protocol and consequences for failing to follow procedures and fulfill expectations
  • Peer review of how each group member contributed to the PLN project will be submitted after the project is completed. 

Assign tasks to be as specific as possible and include a timeline and who is assigned to do each step. 

FINAL PROJECT OUTLINE: 

“Although a written submission will be accepted, consider the modality of this course and consider creating something that reflects the media-connected experience we are all sharing this year.”

The final assignment will consist of your groups creating a walkthrough of PLN themes, platforms, and practices that you have explored during the term. Students should include a variety of discussions about how a PLN should be created, managed, and engaged, including dialogue about how a PLN interacts with social media platforms, highlighting aspects that were the most meaningful during their course trajectory, and any instances of personal experience devoting a PLN within a professional capacity.

Marking will be based on evidence-based examples, the use of professional and engaging language, and the quality of presentation delivery. You will include descriptions of the process and steps that a person would need to take in order to build a personal learning network (PLN) using a variety of social media platforms that would best support your professional and personal learning goals.

Grading Rubric/Assigned to each 5 team members: Please remember to support your topic paragraphs with references of external or internal (course lecture) materials [APA format so we can all be consistent]. 

(Assigned to Kate Ueda) 

• Description of social media platforms, their usage and value to PLN
  • Comparing and contrasting social media platforms.
  • Describe the key characteristics (benefits/negatives) of any discussed social media platforms.
  • Dialogue about how a PLN interacts with social media platforms

(Assigned to Becky Zeng)

• Discussion of key characteristics of PLN
  • Comparing and contrasting key characteristics of PLN
  • How a PLN should be created, managed, and engaged
  • Process and steps that a person would need to take in order to build a personal learning network (PLN) using a variety of social media platforms that would best support your professional and personal learning goals

(Assigned to Abdullahi Bashir)

• Connection to Digital Identity/ Reputation
  • How technology allows you to enhance/develop your digital identity/ reputation?
  • What are social considerations that should be accounted for?
  • Provide examples of individuals who have used a PLN to become leaders in a field of interest and discuss their presence in the platform.
  • How do they use social media platforms to build their reputation/presence? 

(Assigned to Adam Li)

• Connection to Privacy, Security, Data Collection
  • Comparing and contrasting connection to privacy, security, data collection of PLN and how to support concerns.
  • What are the ways the technology tracks and uses your data – how can this be used to benefit a PLN?
  • What are the strengths and weaknesses of the privacy, security and acceptable use policies for social media platforms?

(Assigned to bruce song)

• Connection to Course Content
  • Comparing and contrasting connections to course themes.
  • What features & characteristics of existing media technologies make them effective for personal learning?
  • How will you know that your PLN is a success?
  • Highlighting aspects that were the most meaningful during their course trajectory
  • Any instances of personal experience devoting a PLN within a professional capacity (Should be optional I think, because not everyone has a personal experience within a professional capacity)

Grading Rubric on Project Delivery:

• Making Learning Visible (How students communicated their understanding)
  • comparing and contrasting PLN, social media understanding, and professionalism. The group used their medium of choice (eg. text, video. Infographic) to describe their comparison and choice and added clear details, additional links and resources and information.
• Delivery
  • Delivery of information is excellent; media, images, graphs, charts and other image types are incorporated;

Things to Consider:

• Describe the key characteristics (benefits/negatives) of any discussed social media platforms.
• What features & characteristics of existing media technologies make them effective for personal learning?
• How does the discussed technology allow you to enhance/develop your digital identity/reputation?
• What are social considerations that should be accounted for?
• What are the ways the technology tracks and uses your data – how can this be used to benefit a PLN?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the privacy, security and acceptable use policies for social media platforms?
• Provide examples of individuals who have used a PLN to become leaders in a field of interest and discuss their presence in the platform.
• How do they use social media platforms to build their reputation/presence? 
• How will you know that your PLN is a success?
• Provide references and resources to your opinion and team consensus.

• Can your PLN be used to help professional development post-course?

yes, absolutely, PLN is something you can continuesly build up thruought the year, and therefore, it is definitely something you can keep utilize after the post course period. You can always build up small in some area amd gradually emerge into that area to have influence, for exmaple while you are in course you can reach to the professional associated pages or people in your interest or join a community of that kinda a interest to build the base for that type of professional development in the future.

• Can your PLN be relied on to open professional opportunities?

Yes, joining into communities will help you emerge into the social space and as you are you gain professionality step by step of your own knolwege you will be able to further emerge into the community by giving back to these people in the community and thus slowly build connections in the professional cirlcle and thus earn more insight and professional opporutnities.

• You do not have to review the complete video – select sections you think are important to reflect on, and please reference the time index in your references.

The sections that is important are how to start, most of us here are really Blank piece of paper when it comes to starting up PLN, and we have never done it before, in the video I could not recall for when but there were a clear distinctive messege in reaching out, if you don’t have the direct professionalism or what it takes to connect to reach out, merge yourself into a community and once you have had a little bit of knowlege of yourself after learning from the group and doing your own reasearch, merge more into the group by slowly sharing stuff back and fourth with them to build interaction with one another. This is very important because this can help the newbies which have no personal connection or no influence in thier own blog to build their connections, they can join a group and learn bit by bit and eventually go on to build connections with the group.

·       Open dialogues about media literacy and factual information can create conflict; why does this happen?

media literacy is an art how how to present information to the audience thru media, this does not mean that the information should be factual or prioritied in truth seeking since its priorities are in how to present them for you to get the desired effect on the audience.

Since the goal of media literacy is to best express the information you want the audience to hear to gain the desired influence toward them, it all depends on what you want your channell to be like, for exmaple, if it is a business oriented channel rather than an educational one, you want to give the critical public audience what they want to see rather than what they need to see. Just like how in the video, Julie Smith has mentioned that if you want to gain support and popularity, you would post cat hating post if 90 percent of all of your followers are pro dog. This is to gain thier support and to think that you are in stance with them. However, If it is an educational based channel you do want to give your followers what they need, you want to be objective in terms of finding facts and what you present, since you do not want to mislead people in terms of what information they approach. Therefore, different channels have different ways to opt for fully media literacy potential, some include manipulating the content for their audience, and this will mean that the content doesn’t have to be factual, therefore sometimes factual information and media literacy can create conflict.

·       What is the benefit of having a PLN that values media literacy?

You would know how to best present yourself to the broad audience to best gain things out of the media (PLN) you create, Audiences are able to follow what they were presented with a clear idea without getting lost or have to pay extra attention to figure out informations that were presented to them in a confusing way.

Explore the video provided and reflect on the themes and questions above, reflecting on how you would curate your social media with a critical public audience.

·       What are the benefits of being in the public eye and having a PLN?

being in the public eye while having PLN will obviously grant you more attention than before because you are a public figure, your PLN will also be more recognized with a perspective of social infuence and a leading trend of opinion, however, whatever you do will also be monitored and if there is something people don’t like it will come back to you and hurt you.

·       Building a community with online tools provided by the employer can be limiting; what are the perceived restrictions and benefits?

The restriction could be limiting the community expansion, if you want to make your community inclusive you need to be ready to expand yourself to accept all the possible types of people and interact with them, having restrictions in mind could potentially put a stop to the expanding power on the community you have built. However the benefit would be that you are more concise into what you want to build you community around and thus it would have fastened the process. Another benefit is that there would not be much confusion and you would not run out of ideas since you are given a guide by the employer.

If I were to curate social media with critical public audience, I would try to share inclusive stuff in the same time try to avoide stuffs that are sensitive to avoide unnecessary judgemental stuff being placed on me. I have to be very careful but also positive at the same time about political correctness because I am a public figure myself.

·       Delivering information in a connected society requires verifiable resources; how to build a PLN to rely on?

first try to expland and reach out to as much people as possible, use your own resource for exmaple if you are a worker, try to build around first your company’s resource and the resource of you boss, and after you expand fast you are able to filter out the unprofessional ones and then pick more reliable options that are verifiable from a professional field. If you are a student, you can reach out to you communities and proffesors for help to build around PLN.

·       Identify the risks and benefits of engaging with a public audience in a media space – what are the risks for a public figure or person in a position of trust (educator, lawyer, government official)?

You can be held accountable for the things you’ve said, since it could potentially have a huge impact on the other’s action, you have to take the responsibility of monitoring the things you say because it can highly dictated the actions and outcomes of people who you are with when you are a public figure or in a positional of trust.

What are the benefits of a diverse and inclusive PLN in social media sharing that understands where you are coming from with messaging that impacts the community?

An influential inclusive PLN can definitely bring people together. If it is a big PLN with a lot of subscribers, it will have minority viewers, this will make the viewers feel more welcomed seeing that their distinct group of a minority status is featured and given respect in the community. Seeing it gave them a feeling of being recognized and included. While since it is a big learning network it will have a lot of prestige among the people that follows it, therefore other people that sees the minority group being featured there will also think that they are included in the big community and will be thus raised with the awareness that this community is an inclusive community that embraces all sort of people with different background and origins. Therefore overall I would say it promotes social inclusiveness for different minority groups when you have a highly followed and recognized PLN network that is spreading inclusivity around. After people viewed post that features different groups it will be in their subconscious mind that the communities also cares about these groups and they are just like the majority group being viewed as a norm without having to face any extra judgment, it leads to one message – the community we live in is an inclusive community.

How diverse is your PLN?

My PLN is not so diverse, it contains my local friend groups and few discussion hobby groups, I do not have really far connections with any professional people that I can help with. I am looking to expand my social media and thus to gain more followers and friend thru different account so I can estblish a variety of relationships, I will also try different apps to set up my PLN and this way I can gain more resources.

What is a learning outcome of your PLN and how are you insuring your exposure to diversity and inclusion?

My PLN is to ensure that i gain knolwedge and experiance from different groups of people, to have an insight of how they will do things and try to take what they do that will in turn benefit me and learn from it. The exposure to diversity and inlusion must be set up that i need to obey a few rules, first is to reach out to different topics that will allow me to learn inclusion well. Second is when setting up the PLN, expect diversities and do not set up a default expected type that I should learn from, in other word, do not set up a bar for people to expect them to be a certain identity or believe a ceratin value, instead, try to know about their values with and understand more about their backgrounds.

How would you create a PLN prior to engaging in a social media campaign on a topic of your choice?

I would first create PLN with where i can get good sources of information from, for exmple people in apps that i message or interact daily, they would be my sources of information when i am interacting with them. Second, I would find groups with common background of interest or institutional group where they are special expert at something, their information shared would allow me to gain potential knowledge of stuff. And once I have that, i would continue to find groups to expand on my connection and building influence, for exmaple: to gain more followers on instagram or join more group of chat or be engaged more in a discussion forum. That way i have more connections and people who listen to me, and once i feel like that is enough, I can go ahead and start the PLN campaign.

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

PLN for alot of people really carries out their personal perspective in thier own ways to reach out in the learning society. Take Brad Baker for exmaple, he was able to create his own PLN and merge it with his own intent of professional approach in the teaching that he does. This apporach is based on his own circumstances that benefits him and the desire he wants to make thru his educational goals. He was able to surround himself with communities that is healthy for him to orchastrate his learning in helping indigenous people learn, which has been greate for him as a indigenous communities that has been born in a family where his dad went to residential school and thus grew up with the values of raising indigenous voices to be heard thru education.

• Consider which social media platforms are beneficial in education, and ask yourself how you would add social media teaching to an industry you’re interested in – expand your thoughts in your blog.

Social media is a great way for people to share their thoughs and values with each other, it is great that people are able to not only learn directly from themselves but also interact and make learning progress more feasible togeather with thier colleagues. Teaching industry could definitely make use of the strong interactivity social media has provided with and make interactive task. For example student writing thier assignment in an open assessible social media platorm and people have to comment, which is what this course is doing. And also student can engage in social media interactivity togeather for example exchange one useful resource related to learning they’ve found with another student and co share their thought on social media about it. That beind said, same activity can also be done in thier reflectivity of doing thier assignment.

• When working with the vulnerable sector, how does social media fit into professionalism and regulations? Consider education, healthcare, and messaging to minor children via social media/gaming. 

One thing that stands out is that socal media is what we can choose to customize based on our own working preference, For example, If i choose to work in a health care sector I will make my page approporiately so that it follows the rules of health care workers, and I will get surroundings with the similar results possible subscribing to similar thread for better resources. And if i do happen to be in a educational setting, I would choose to oriente my social media that way. For minor childern they have to be aware that social medias are connected and very reachable, if they expose themselves too much without much of professional caution, their identity is not going to safe online. It is important that when we use soical media we oriente our personal identity hidden, sometimes in working sections we tend to follow the rules and keep our identities as only professional workers, however, in gaming setting, we can potentially expose our own iderntity, so people need to especially be careful with that if you are a minor.

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

there are lot of the platforms that can be potentially used to develop personal networks, one of them I have used are twitter, since twitter is one of the apps that allows you to interact with people, allow you to have access to media, and also allows you to have many useful artifacts about learning from professional learning channels.

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

they can choose to link themselves with the right people and whom they feel suitable of coming in contact, or they should consider weather or not these person are professionals in terms of learning. in the reading : View of Understanding personal learning networks: Their structure, content and the networking skills needed to optimally use them | First Monday it shows how people should construct and maintain their learning network which I find really helpful. It has mentioned that many factors plays a role such as the nature of the tie, and nature of the profession you are trying to learn.

• How do data privacy and security limit and/or promote a PLN?

One way it would limit it is the privacy settings and data control, I would say if your settings were way too private other people cannot reach you and thus you might lose a chance of potentially building and expanding your interactive network. However, it you are too open it could cause too much disturbance with too many people approaching and thus it would be hard for you to focus on really building your network, you always want to keep your tied clear and concise.

• In your network how can you create a digital identity/ reputation?

It is best to write more about topics you are interested and let people know you are, act kindly, and show potential for collaboration and potential for learning by sharing context that makes you able to collaborate with others and show insights of it.

• How did pivots to work-from-home during the COVID-19 pandemic change how we should consider our social media connectivity and professional balance?

a lot of times now we are just working from home after the hit of covid-19, it is more than important to value the online working as part of the adjustment we will be making long term and therefore we have to readjust to the notion of communicating “virtually” since we are able to make real working out put and learning progress that are contributed from a virtual space. Therefore, every virtual thing we thought as fake before is being taken real and more serious upon. Upon realizing that, people started to shift more of their workload into working online and started to use it as a platform to build real personal reputations and makes connections thru it.

At the end, here is my V&R map, I drew it since I couldn’t find the app to draw it online.