Social media plays an important role in our daily life; we rely on it to connect with friends and conduct entertainments. However, using social media to networks means to build, maintain and active social connections online to share new feeds, life experiences, discharging feelings and more. With the development of technologies, learning has become an activity that can be done from many different places, and the internet has provided further opportunities for people to build their own learning networks. People can learn from networks with others through social media as a personal learning network (PLN). That is, opportunities for learning from peers, coworkers, supervisors, experts, other professionals and more other people online, regardless of time and physical distance, have become available. Consequently, through a network of trusted connections, people are able to learn from anyone they desire from the regular use of social media. This type of connection is random and informal with a much broader range of people and varying levels and kinds of expertise (Gutierrez, 2016). Instead of sitting in a classroom to study formal and structured knowledge, using social media as a learning network allows learners to support their professional and non-formal learning needs.
When people desire to learn and engage through a platform, they must start to build a PLN intentionally frist. During this process, adding new people to the network is a necessary process for the sake of preparing learning resources. Afterwards, maintaining connections to keep in touch with relevant persons needs to be completed. Lastly, learners have to actively connect with selected people to allow for new learning. Through the PLN, learners are able to establish activating strong ties to do activities such as brainstorming with others, weak ties to reach known contact and to build weak and very weak ties to connect with networking events or an online social networking site (Rajagopal, et al., 2011). Learners can then gain educational benefits at each stage of their careers. Establishing PLN provides a person knowledge, information, advice, connection and future career opportunity; these benefits are reasons that motivate learners to participate in a network.
For example, connecting with new people or maintaining relations after events enables a person to build a professional relationship, and it also provides information sources and pathways. Through the professional network, learners could get new ways to develop themselves when they needed, receive up-to-date information from experts, and get help when they need to find answers and advice (Gutierrez, 2016). Moreover, people tend to connect with people they like or trust, whom they feel a particular connection, and people who share common visions on the domain. That is, people are able to build a trusted and comfortable learning environment through PLN. Through this trusted network, real potential for collaboration and learning can happen. In addition, reputation plays an important role in network ties. Users could connect with experts because they are repeatables, and they could also be connected by others because they are trustable.
It is clear that public communications can bring lots of rewards for a person. Today, climate, technology, economic and social change alter the needs of personal skills and people must keep learning to ensure their knowledge is not outdated. PLN, on the other hand, is a tool to engage a person in lifelong learning, and it helps people to get practical skills to adapt to future life (University of Southampton, n.d). There are also risks in public communication. In a networked world, data is persistent, replicable, searchable and scalable, which means that a slip-up or data leakage can leak protected data into broader databases. Consequently, data surveillance can be one of the biggest issues for using public communication (Boyd, 2012). Individuals and social media platforms need to find ways to achieve privacy in networked publics.
References
Gutierrez, K. (2016). What are Personal Learning Networks?. Shift Learning. Retrieved from
https://www.shiftelearning.com/blog/personal-learning-networks
University of Southampton. (n.d). What is a Personal Learning Network (PLN)?. Futurelearn. Retrieved from
https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/learning-network-age/0/steps/24644
Rajagopal, K., Brinke, D., Bruggen, J. and Sloep, P. (2011). Understanding personal learning networks: Their structure, content and the networking skills needed to optimally use them. Retrieved from
https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3559/3131
Boyd, D. (2012). Surveillance & Society. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v10i3/4.4529