Hello everyone,

As a current student at UVIC whenever I heard someone talking about networking, I had always assumed that it was a term predominately just for business students. After doing the readings this week, I am happy to say that I understand networking better and can see how networking is extremely important for business students and why it is important for all majors and for all people.

I understand now that personalized learning networks are not just people we encounter regularly, but also people we reach out to for collaboration on ideas, ways to get input on ideas, and many more interactions.  Using social media to network allows us to have many different options to reach out to people and for certain interactions.  With emerging social media, I have noticed that there are certain platforms for specific kinds of networking. Twitter is more specific for finding out news or any topics that might be trending in the news.  Facebook has more family networking but also is better for larger groups of people so you can gather communities and interact with people in your neighborhood or city, or with people who have similar concerns or questions as you.  However, in my opinion, the best way to network using social media seems to be LinkedIn, they provide you with contacts you might know based on your education history and people who have similar jobs or majors as you. This allows a quick way to ask for collaboration on ideas, to find out new technology in your career, and to learn new things. The way I understand it to network using social media is to use social media to your advantage and an easy way to improve your networking skills. What do you think it means to network using social media?

I think we are motivated to participate in networked publics because of how frequently the world is changing. With the change of Covid we ourselves were motivated to network I feel like for the sake of human communication. As life progressed back to normal businesses and jobs started to see the benefit and motivated people to participate more in networked publics. However, working at a not-for-profit organization I have seen firsthand how once you start networking it is easier to maintain and motivates people more to network since they have seen firsthand how it benefits themselves. Have you noticed any particular ways you have been motivated to participate in networked publics?

I feel that for the most part, Gen z has had the benefit of growing up with technology in numerous ways one of which is the education we got in being safe while online. This included only talking to people you know, never telling people where you live online, etc. but with online networking, it is a little tougher. We interact with people online every day that we don’t know, for example, in this class I have never met any of you in person just online. However, this might seem unsafe online I know all of you are students at the University of Victoria, and that I am not at any risk, but I actually benefit because this allows me a way to network with new people. I can learn new things from people in this class, I can ask you questions to get a different viewpoint and interact in many other ways. Yes, there are privacy concerns in public communications that pose a risk, and they are really important to consider, however, if we are able to benefit from public communications without any risks or if proper precautions are put in place, then we should use networking to our benefit.