Sterling's Boarding School

The field of Media Literacy teaches us to apply critical thinking to the way we consume media and use it to create our own ideas and messages. This means that media consumption is a skill that needs to be honed and practiced. Indeed, social media contains a sea of knowledge and opportunities that could be hugely beneficial if used the right way. Many people are able to make the most out of their presence on social media by creating a PLN that allows for constant learning and even a platform to share their ideas and develop their careers. These people can garner a large online following, and with benefits comes risks.

Having a PLN while in the public eye has many advantages. Public figures have a far wider audience for their messages, compared to “regular” people, whose PLN most likely consists of family, friends and co-workers. They are more likely to find people who echo their sentiment, as well as those who disagree and challenge their ideas. These discussions allow them to grow and deepen their knowledge. Publicity also allows them to expand their PLNs more easily. They could reach out to a peer who they wish to learn from and be more easily accepted, as their work is available publicly. In the same vein, they could be the ones others reach out to for collaborative efforts, creating mutually beneficial relationships. These relationships exists in many professions. Scholars are always learning from their peers and collaborating to share their work; professional athletes workout together on days off to hone their skills; Youtubers often make videos replying to each other, allowing them to both learn and create entertaining content. However, engaging with a public audience also has risks that public figures have to consider.

One of the most concerning trends on the Internet the last few years is “cancel culture”. Information lasts forever on the Internet, and public figures understand this fact better than most. Messages shared online could be easily taken out of context or misinterpreted, damaging one’s image. Ideas that go against the expected norms could invoke outcries that hamper one’s career. In 2018, famous comedian Kevin Hart had to step down from hosting the Oscars, an opportunity he had previously described as a “lifelong dream”, due to a controversy. A series of his homophobic tweets and jokes, dating as far as 9 years prior, was circulated on the internet. There are also security risks involved with internet fame. There have been numerous reports on celebrities being “doxed”, having their personal information leaked online and subsequently harassed. Another risk that concerns their followers is the potential for the mass spreading of misinformation.

Public attention to “fake news” has risen since Donald Trump’s successful presidential campaign in 2016. Trust in traditional mass media has decreased and social media has taken over as many people’s main news source. Internet sources have varying levels of credibility, and we have to rely on our media literacy to analyze them. Bias exists in all forms of media, especially in journalism. Facts can be framed and worded to fit the publisher’s agenda, and statistics can be manipulated to give readers false impressions. To form our own opinions, it is important to learn the bias of our sources and listen to all sides. We can also rely on our PLNs to combat false information, refer to relevant ties in our networks to verify the facts.

We are sure to experience criticism when our messages are in the public eye. It is important to identify valid criticisms from personal attacks or misinterpretations. If the criticism is valid, we need to stay open minded and reflect on our personal ideas and values. Conflicts between ideas are opportunities to learn and evolve, everyone is expected to change over time. When you are challenged, think critically about their arguments, and ask yourself, do you have sufficient reasons to stick to your values?

I grew up and went to high school in Hanoi, Vietnam. Unlike most high schools in the country, my school had the reputation for being diverse, in the sense that it recruited students from all over the country. It was the first time I was exposed to a learning environment where not everyone in my classes lived within a 10km radius from me. I had a classmate from out of town, and I could not give the correct answer when questioned about whether her hometown was in the Northern or Southern half of the country.

A personal learning network (PLN) is something we develop throughout our lives, whether we are conscious of it or not. This moment when my friend taught me about the geography of her hometown was when I became aware of how much I could learn from everyone around me because everyone, in their own way, is different.

My journey to understanding diversity and inclusion in learning would evolve greatly, as I move to Canada to attend university. Comparing to Vietnam, Canada’s learning environment is more diverse in many ways. I had the opportunity to interact and network with people from different countries, different walks of life, political beliefs, different identities and sexual orientations. Faced with the challenge of having to try and understand it all, I turn to the Internet for help, and that was when I realized the importance of utilizing technology the right way. I was on the wrong platform for the job. Facebook was the dominant social platform in Vietnam, but it is wildly unpopular among people my age in the western world. My first step in diversifying my network was to engage with new platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram, where I learned more about my peers, the way they share their thoughts, beliefs and interests. These social media sites also allowed me to learn about the social and political climate of the west, form my own beliefs and engage in active discussions with my peers. As a foreigner I was ecstatic to be included in healthy discussions and activities in a system that I thought was well built for learning. I soon found out that not everyone had the same positive experience I did.

My best friend is a Cree, one of the First Peoples of this land that I now reside in. Through her I learned about the history of indigenous people in Canada, and their relationship with the modern government. The level of inclusion that I enjoyed was not afforded to many, in a country that prides itself on its diversity. Then I and many Canadians learned about horrific incidents that had been buried by the history books. Centralized media is a big part of many people’s PLNs, but its decrease in popularity and loss of public trust in recent memory made me question the reliability of every aspects of my PLN. The only way forward was to make sure my PLN was diverse and include others the way my peers had included me.

Clark and Aufderheide (2011) analyzed the term “Public Media 2.0” as “media both for and by the public” (p. 56). The manifestation of this is social media sites. These sites, along with new technologies, have done a good job in being accessible and providing platforms for a large portion of the population, demonstrated by their large user bases. The interactive nature of social media creates opportunities for learning never seen before. Users could share their thoughts, see others’ opinions and participate in discussions with very few constraints. While new media has been an integral part of one’s PLN, it can also presents challenges to efficient communications. Without a learning attitude, online discussions among a diverse crowd can quickly turn toxic. The relative anonymity of the online space has led to the sharing of offensive, malicious content as well as given way to cyberbullying. Conversations about differing opinions can quickly turn into personal insults and even threats. It is up to the individual to filter online content, and treat opposite opinions as learning opportunities.

References

Clark, J., & Aufderheide, P. (2011). A new vision for public media. In S. C. Jansen, J. Pooley, & L. Taub-Pervizpour (Eds.), Media and social justice (pp. 55-67). New York, USA: Palgrave Macmillan.

Every young person know how hard it can be to help older family members understand modern technology. Have you ever thought about why that is? Or if the same would happen to you in time? Are some people simply better at adapting to the ever changing technologies of the modern age? These are the questions that David White from the University of Oxford seeks to answer with his Visitor and Resident model.

The Visitor and Resident model offers a fresh perspective on the topic, measuring how we engage with different technologies and platforms to determine our “status”. On the Visitor-Resident continuum, a visitor is someone who uses a platform as a tool that they put away after use, leaving no social trace (eg. purchasing items from online vendors or watching an online video). On the other hand, a resident engages an online platform with social purposes in mind. They use these platforms to communicate, socialize and share their thoughts, leaving social footprints after closing the website. According to White, in his series of Youtube guides, most of us will use a combination of visitor mode and resident mode when we go online. This leads to his concept of “V&R mapping”.

Above is my version of a V&R map, with my most used online platforms. You can create your own version here.

The map consists of two axes: the aforementioned Visitor-Resident axis and the Personal-Institutional axis. The Personal-Institutional relates to the purpose of your usage of an online platform, personal use and professional use (eg. watching a cat video because cats are adorable vs. watching a cat video because you have to write a report about feline biology). These two axes together allows us to reflect on how we engage with these platforms. As a student, platforms with specific educational purposes lie in the bottom half of the model, such as my school’s learning platform Brightspace or the conferencing software Zoom. This would be the baseline for a student in the online age. However, if we take a look at the platforms in the second quadrant, we would find social media sites that are far larger in scale than the learning platforms I mentioned. This means while these sites are also larger in scope, as they can have multiple functions, there is a huge potential to use them for learning that I am not tapping into. I could greatly expand my Personal Learning Network (PLN) as a student by expanding these sites to be on both sides of the horizontal axis, similar to how I use Whatsapp for both personal and professional communications.

Above is the revised position of three platforms I find to have the most potential for a learning network. Instagram has perhaps the largest amount of users and content out of the three, requiring us to use both visitor mode to consume educational contents and resident mode to participate in discussion. However, Instagram does not promote active discussion to the level that Reddit and Discord do, therefore my level of residency is not as high. Reddit and Discord are community-based platforms, where we could find communities of people with similar interest and learning goals to interact with.

Reddit promotes anonymity, so it is easy to find a variety of topics and people with different points of view. With such a site, it is important that we are wary of the integrity of sources, as well as security risks associated with dealing with anonymous users. This could hamper our development of a learning network.

While Discord is most popular among the gaming community, it has massive potential for learning and networking, and creating strong ties. Like Reddit, Discord allows for people with similar interests to come together and learn from each other. The security risks of Reddit is minimalized because to join a Discord server, you need to be provided with an invitation link. Of course, this makes Discord less accessible than other sites. However, Discord excels at connecting people with real life similarities (similar university majors or occupations) and allowing them to share their experiences in a secure space. It is because of these reasons that Discord is closer to the Resident extreme on my map.

There are many other ways to expand your learning network. While I revised my V&R map and learned how to better utilize social platforms, it could be beneficial to include more platforms into my existing network and create a strong professional digital identity. An example could be for me to create a LinkedIn profile as a starting point for potential employers, one that would refer them to my presence on other sites and demonstrate my learning experience.

Visualizing my online presence in this way has helped me identify how to maximize the benefits of social platforms in learning and networking. I encourage you to do the same here, and share how you could expand your own learning network using this model in the comments! Thank you for reading!