CC 5 – Revisiting and Refining CC#4
In today’s digital age, social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn play a very important role in how we connect with people, how we share information and how we learn new things. Since the beginning of this course, we have been discussing Personal Learning Networks (PLNs) and how they help us connect to people with similar intrests, backgrounds, share knowledge with them and learn from their perspectives.However, after doing the reading for week 5, I have realized that simply having a PLN does not guarantee that we are learning from different perspectives. The way social media lets us interact with people also influences whom we connect with and what information we perceive.
One of the most interesting topics I found in week 5’s reading was Social media affordances.
For example, LinkedIn is used by most university students to connect with professionals from different fields, share their experiences, or learn from them. Similarly, YouTube, as a social media platform, helps us to learn so many skills through videos. These platforms make it easy for us to build strong PLNs and connect with people from different parts of the world. However, after learning about the affordances, I realized how these platforms not only help us connect to different people but also
influence the information we see and the people we interact with.
For instance, I personally use YouTube on a daily basis for educational purposes such as learning about Artifical intelligence, watching a project workshop or checking the new tech. stuff etc. Whenever I watch a few videos on a particular topic, YouTube just starts recommending more similar videos. Intially i thought its helpfull for me, as I don’t have to search on my own, but after the readings I understood that I might be missing out on different ideas and perspectives. Even though my recommendation section was based on what I watched before, it might still restrict some ideas and exposure for me. This made me realize that technology can make our learning very easy, but at the same time it can influence what we see and learn through our Personal Learning Network.
This also connects well with the reading from this week about echo chambers and epistemic bubbles.
An epistemic bubble happens when certain information is missing from our network, and echo chambers happen when we start trusting the information from our own group and reject outside opinions and perspectives. I think this can happen with Our Personal learning networks as well when we only connect with people who have similar interests to ours. No matter how many connections we have, we can still miss out on different perspectives and opinions. This helped me to understand that a strong PLN should not just introduce new people to us, but also new ideas and perspectives.
Conclusion: These readings have helped me understand the importance of having a diverse Personal Learning network. I acknowledge that it is important to learn from different people and their opinions. I hope to explore more ideas in the future and create a better PLN for myself.
References
Bucher, T., & Helmond, A. (2018). The affordances of social media platforms. In J. Burgess, T. Poell, & A. Marwick (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of social media (pp. 233–253). SAGE Publications. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781473984066.n14
Nguyen, C. T. (2020). Echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Episteme, 17(2), 141–161. https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2018.32