PLN and Education is by far, one of my favorite topics in this course. I enjoyed listening to Brad Baker’s experience as an educator who advocates for the inclusion of Indigenous people in Canada. If I will be given a chance, I would like to have Brad Baker as my teacher because he has a diverse background. He is not only campaigning for anti racism (Miller 1:30) but he is also fighting for the land claim issues within the Indigenous nation (Miller 1:47). I wanted him to be my teacher because I would like to hear his stories and learn from it. From Brad Baker’s experiences as an educator, an advocate of the inclusion of Indigenous people, and as a social media user, I learned that PLN can help one amplify his/her voice. This is because PLN cannot only help one convince other people to support his/her advocacy, but it could also be a way for one to meet other people who also have the same belief and advocacy. Just as Brad Baker said, “Your professional learning community is really your support system.” (Miller 4:07) If one’s professional learning community becomes his/her support system, then he/she will be able to come up with different ways to make their advocacy more appealing to others.
Today’s form of education can no longer be confined in the four walls of the classroom. Building up on the function of PLN stated in the previous paragraph, modern educators can extend their classrooms in the social media. PLNs can be created through social media which allows teachers to provide a kind of learning experience to their students that will encourage them to collaborate with other learners or seek the help of professionals online. Social media like Flock and Feedly can also be used as browsers that students can utilize to look for content (Veletsianos 125). In other words, social media can make students’ way of learning more diverse. In addition to this, engaging with other learners in social media allows learners to take charge of their own learning. On the side of the teachers, on the other hand, social media can allow them to make their classrooms more dynamic and it gives them an opportunity to experiment on different teaching strategies. Lastly, aside from making the teachers and students’ classroom experience better, PLN can also raise awareness on the opportunities in education. In the case of Brad Baker for example, he used his PLN to share his father’s experience of being a survivor of a residential school (Miller 5:02). This means that contributors on social media like Brad Baker become authentic sources that learners can draw inspiration from.
Despite the fact the PLN can be helpful in the field of education, both teachers and learners should still be cautious of its negative side. In the previous lessons, privacy was tackled in this class so that could be one of the dangers of using PLN in education. Aside from privacy issues, there is also a concern of cyber bullying. In the video, Professor Jesse mentioned that social media can be too polarized sometimes to the point that certain groups of people would cancel other groups of people. For me, this is not a good thing because PLN is suppose to bring people together not tear them apart. In pointing out these negative sides of using PLN and social media in education, I did not intend to scare the learners and educators of the possible challenges they might encounter. These downsides can help them set their expectations when it comes to using PLN and social media in education.
Works Cited
Miller, Jesse. “EDCI 338 Brad Baker.” YouTube, 5 Mar. 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy63SmEpvCw.
Veletsianos, George. “Developing Personal Learning Networks for Open and Social Learning.” Emerging Technologies in Distance Education, Au P, 2010, pp. 109-128.
Rachelle says:
Hi Yuxi!
Great blog post this week! I am also pleased that Brad Baker was chosen as a guest speaker this week. It’s great to see some Indigenous representation in Education! Growing up in Victoria, I actually did not have a single teacher of Indigenous descent. Although in school we would sometimes have guests from the Coast Salish tribe to come and teach us about traditional arts and culture, in retrospect, I think that it would have been powerful to have a guest of a similar background come in as a guest speaker for something like a history class? Jesse had a good point about history being written by the ‘victors’ and I am saddened that I did not have the opportunity to learn about history from more of an Indigenous standpoint until University.
I liked your statement about social media enabling users to “take charge of their own learning”, I feel that in everyday discourse, this side of social media is often overlooked. The way that we are learning is changing, and I think that incorporating online tools will help education keep up with the times. I also think that when we are able to make connections between material learnt in school and our lived experience, we are able to learn material more effectively. Social media for a lot of us happens to be a part of that lived experience from a very early age. I personally have memories of trying to use a computer before I could read.
I agree that cancel culture can be very toxic. I think that we should strive to achieve more transparency and accountability in our society, however, cancel culture is unfortunately not about accountability. I think that educators know better than anyone that we do learn from our mistakes, and that we in some cases learn best from our mistakes, so I think it is important to recognize that mistakes should be treated as opportunities for growth. In addition, I also think that is important that people receive second chances.
March 13, 2021 — 12:50 pm
yuxitang says:
Hi Rachelle! Thanks for leaving an insightful reply. Cancel culture can really be toxic that is why PLN members need to be very wise with the kind of conversations or discussions that they can participate in. Although I still believe that it is still possible for people with different opinions to discuss a certain topic, sometimes it is hard to know when the conversation will start to become toxic. In this regard, people need to very very careful with sharing their opinion. Also, it would be a good thing to only connect with people one already had a history of contact with. Through this, the PLN members will already have an idea on how that person with react with regard to a certain topic.
March 20, 2021 — 10:56 pm
heyhey says:
Hi Xitang,
Thank you for this well written post! I really appreciate it that you included the possible negative aspects of PLN in your post. In my opinion, in addition to cyber bullying, which results from polarization of opinions on social media, polarization of opinions online poses another potential threat to our learning, that is, students might learn partial or false information from social media if opinions are greatly polarized. For example, if students are are intended to learn about how people view politics, because of polarization of opinions, they might come to the conclusion that people’s political views differs greatly from each other and that there is little room for reconciliation. However, if students conduct their research with people face-to-face, they might come to a different conclusion that although people’s political views differ from others in some aspects, there are also a lot aspects that people generally agree on, despite their political stances.
March 14, 2021 — 10:38 am