week 5 Microblogging and Building PLN

Twitter [online image], available at www.about.twitter.com

 Twitter at first was only a social network for me and I didn’t know it could be a great tool for supporting micro-blogging. In this week, I set up my Twitter and created a ‘1p32 list’, I connected with most of my classmate and the immediacy of the messages helped me feel like more of a group. Professor light in his video “most effective classes” pointed out that learners benefit from the diversity of students in a class by sharing their assignments and insights. I think tools like Twitter should be encourage among learners, especially for online courses, it allows learners to communicate, share ideas and learn together, it changes the dynamics of the virtual classroom.

Another great feature that I think I will keep using is to share valuable internet contents via my twitter account (most of the curation tools that I learned recently also support Tweeting). Twitter is a pretty good search engine, it helps me look for sources that fit in my search, I follow them, then new information will come directly to me and then I tweet them. What I like about it is that, my followers will see the contents right away and we can always expand our discussion accordingly. Collaborative learning is powerful and Twitter is engaging learners to step out of the box and learn together.

Kawai's Twitter page, 2013

Although Twitter helps building my PLN, it also involves in my PLE. I could add Twitter under ‘gather information’ and ‘application’ in my PLE and I am sure I would make good use of it.

no author [online image]

My PLN is growing and I started to realize the ongoing changes in technology is affecting everyone who gets in touch with the cyber world every day, and that means we, as an internet user, need to know how to model a successful digital citizenship and promote responsible behaviours in the digital contexts. For example, we should respects the freedom of the speech but we have to also aware of the language, images and symbols that we use when posting, blogging, tweeting … etc. “A good digital citizen seeks out feedback from other to evaluate their use of technology, and then makes personal adjustments based on this feedback.” (Ribble, 2011), I must remind myself about contributing and promoting the values of digital citizenship when using the internet.

PLE week 5 update