From this course, I realize that PLN will help us in our future career development and study. Although it also has some shortcomings such privacy and misinformation, we can undoubtedly get more useful information and knowledge from social media platform. Before this course, I used social media to chat with friends, find communities with similar interests, and watch some news events. But after this course, establishing a PLN will be my main purpose of using social media platform such as Twitter and Facebook. I will pay more attention to digital leaders in my field and try to attract followers who are interested in business and aim to develop their own business. Meanwhile, I also learned to maintain an open and inclusive attitude in my PLN. It is necessary to know that not all negative comments are bad. If a reader points out the factual errors on our blog, it will be very helpful feedback. However, we should also focus more on positive reviews. Effective negative reviews will improve the quality of our PLN, but most of the positive reviews will give us confidence in continuing to publish articles.With the occurrence of the digital revolution, when we share information , we will actually gain greater influence. Compared with information, influence is more important on social platforms because information is now easily approachable (Qualman, 2012). Everyone is a transmitter of information, but not everyone is an influencer or opinion leader.
When we become a digital leader, our main role is to increase user awareness and engagement. We need to provide enough information without causing confusion. Also, we need to make people aware of the situation and help them understand the situation(Qualman, 2012). Our PLN needs to attract people with the same interests and create a community to help these people express different insights on the same event. We don’t need users who speak rudely and do not put forward valuable opinions. BLOCK is a good feature. As an influencer in social platforms, we need to ensure the accuracy of information sources. Information needs to be obtained from professional media or academic articles. Of course, even academic articles will be questioned by peers or experiments cannot be confirmed after publication. It is necessary to constantly correct the information and admit mistakes in order to ensure the authority and credibility of the account in the field.
Finally, through learning from Jesse’s conversations with people in many professional fields, I found that social media can break the boundaries of race and let us hear the voices of people from all over the world. Social media can also allow us to meet more experts and communicate with them. Many career opportunities are born from our published articles. However, the performance of social media may also have a negative impact on our career development. When we publish some opinions on the personal account that are inconsistent with the values of the applicant company, it is likely to be seen by our recruiters and eliminated us. Therefore, we need to focus on media literacy whether it is a personal account or a professional account. We need the ability to use mass communication resources correctly and constructively, to make full use of media resources to improve ourselves and participate in social progress. An excellent media literacy can enhance the influence of our PLN and ultimately play a positive role in our personal development. I will continue to build my own personal learning network and improve my media literacy in the future.
Thank you Jesse and my EDCI338 classmates!
Reference
Qualman, E., & Books24x7, I. (2012;2011;). Digital leader: 5 simple keys to success and influence (1st ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Hi Mike!
This was a great final post! I appreciated that you mentioned the possible negative impacts being online can have. I think sometimes I get so caught up in all the amazing benefits that sometimes I forget there is also a need to be cautious! Reading your post made it easy for me to tie together a lot of the themes we covered this semester. Your last paragraph especially tied together themes including inclusion, benefits of social media, potential risks, and therefore the importance of media literacy. I think you did a fantastic job of summarizing the course and it’s main concepts, because by reading your post, I too was able to reflect on all of these themes and how they connect. Great job!