Week 5 Post: PLN and Inclusion

How diverse is your PLN?

The diversity of a PLN could be evaluated in many aspects. The types of social media platforms, the tags I want my digital identity to have, the people I follow or add friends with, the topics or groups I am in, the questions I search for, as well as the posts I create that shows who I am and what I am potentially interested in. I think all of these aspects could be captured and interpreted into a general idea of the diversity of our digital identity.

Having a diverse PLN can be good for personal learning and inquiring knowledge and information as you could get them from more resources and fields. Diverse ways of thinking could sometimes create beautiful results or even products. Therefore I try to make my PLN as diversity as possible.

Are you learning from a variety of diverse voices and are you expanding your understanding of the views of others?

I think I am learning from diverse voices by searching for, listening to and reading about one same topic from different resources. I also tend to discuss and make comments on other people’s posts or ideas while trying to include reading more people’s thoughts. I have not been actively trying to expand my understanding of the views of other but I do think that it is difficult to prevent because we tend to accept the views that we already believe in and find it hard to take in new ideas that we do not like or understand by default.

Although it is hard to not put our own views on other people’s opinions, I do try and break the habit by training myself to think more in the other people’s perspectives. Always ask why they would do, say or think in certain ways and reflect what I would do in that situation. I think it helps me to respect others views rather than making my views the only view I’d believe in.

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

One thing that I am in control of as to make my PLN more diverse, is that I try to use different social media platforms that have different features. For example, Twitter is really good to share and capture instant ideas and thoughts, as well as reaching out to strangers of the same interests. While blogs are more of a place for organized thoughts or even conclusions. TikTok on the other hand, presents ideas in a totally different way and all these platforms include different kinds of people of various backgrounds, interests and ways of thinking. The people I follow, be friends with or communicate to are also good in making my PLN diverse because I could active include people from different cultural, regional, educational backgrounds.

Another thing that I cannot quite control in terms of making my PLN diverse, is the digital identity that social media optimization engine recognize me as. We may all have had the experience that when we search for a keyword by accident on a platform, we start seeing similar things on that platform for the following days and like Shelley Moore mentioned in the Talk, the platforms seem to know better about what we like than ourselves do. These tags that the platforms put on us for our digital identity could make it difficult for us to see more diverse opinions, posts or discussions we would like to see.

“Always try something new” would be one thing I would like to start doing. Keep myself open-minded either when I see a new flavor of ice cream or a new type of phone application. Giving myself the tags so that either people or the search engine would recognize me as someone who would is open to new experience is my strategy to being more diverse and inclusive.