Me or Us, The Building of Communities and Personal Learning Networks

     

      

        Many people currently use the social media and online pages to search for new recipes for dinner, or DIY project ideas without a second thought. Those communities that we readily rely on day in and day out. Who gathers the information that we search for? How do groups keep content flowing and localized? In chapter six of "The Connected Educator" Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Lani Ritter Hall delve into the mechanisms of  Communities and how to build them. They also draw a line in the sand on how individual's personal learning networks interact with the communities. I will later answer the prior questions and elaborate on how these can be applied to ones career building by using my own future career as a guinea pig. For future reference and to help differentiate the two terms "Communities" and "personal learning networks", Hall and Nussbaum-Beach clarified

  "Networks are what you want to learn. Communities are about the collective us and what we are building or improving on together, systematically. The potential for your network to help you learn lies in its diversity, the quality of relationships, your anility to filter well and your willingness to give as well as take."

       To answer to my questions, communities build the hubs of info you find on social media and servers. The authors pulled David Lee's 4L Model "Leaders" as David Lee models, structure and guide the pages so they are easier to get involved in. To have a community people have to interact and input their thoughts to build the environment. These are the "Learning" group, those who actively participate. People who are directly involved in the craft and hobbyists. "Lurking" is the average person that is part of the community as said earlier. The average person on a page on to look for recipes. "Linking" are those who haven't joined the group but still follow it and pop in and out, sharing articles they like and such. Chapter six also touches on when using networks for professional interest someone can either have a large quantity of variable information flow through their feed, or they can filter who they follow to make sure what they do see is only certain topics. In either case a professional does a base level vetting of the information they are going to bring back to their communities. 

        Regarding how I will relate this to my career, first things first, I am a Biotechnology major and I hope to dual degree with Medical technology that way I have a wider range of positions I can qualify for in relatively close fields. I intend to work for the Department of Health as a lab tech as a starting position. As I fill that roll I intend to build my laboratory knowledge. I can accomplish this goal by creating professional online accounts and joining scientific communities and pages online. Such as twitter pages that relate to my field like The Journal of Microbiology's official page. This journal will come in handy if I intended to help a project that is dealing with a lot of bacteria or smaller biological mechanisms. I think scientific are a good analogy for this chapters premise. They are published by people in the research community that study their own niche area and provide reports to be reviewed by the journal and published to the public. The general science community reenacts the experiment and documents their own findings and state any possible qualms with the original study. This phase is called being peer reviewed. Once studies have been peer reviewed general scientists feel more at ease using a study as a reference for their own work. 

 Citation 

The Connected Educator: Learning and Leading in a Digital Age, by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Lani R Hall, Solution Tree Press, 2012, pp. 91–107.