Keeping It Simple
It is amazing how when you take something like your own digital network and look at it, really look at it in a visual representation, you see connections and intertwining that you hadn’t known were there. I categorized my network into four ‘zones’: Work, School, Personal Socials and what I lovingly refer to as the Bleeding Zone. Let me break that down.
Work: In this space, I find my network within Office 365, Teams and Outlook (email). I did not choose the tools and platforms used in this space, and it is as Veletsianos (2016) describes a ‘group‘, in that it is controlled by the institution and entry and exit is managed.
School: Here I find my “learning network” (Veletsianos, 2016), and while a portion of this network has a gatekeeper (Royal Roads University), this network does have a back-channel in Discord that allows us to dip our toe into a ‘community’ structure.
Bleeding Zone: This is where school intersects with work. Twitter and LinkedIn are both enmeshed in my work network and my school network.
Personal Socials: This is just me in social media. I control who participates and I choose what is posted based purely on my life (typically) outside of work and school.
References
Veletsianos, G. (2016). Digital learning environments. In N. Rushby & D. Surry (Eds), Handbook of Learning Technologies (pp. 242-260). UK: John Wiley & Sons.
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