The wide range and diversity of PLN allow powerful messaging for an individual or community. Individual or community could either message or receive information from others through PLN, and the information delivery is always quick and timely within wide range. For example, if someone wants to hold an activity and welcome everyone to participate, he/she could post a message in her/his PLN and create some hashtags, others who interested in the hashtags would be attracted by the activity as his/her message is spreading by the PLN. Also, PLN could keep a message forever unless the publisher deletes it, this feature could help messaging information to others as well. For example, if a community manager publishes an announcement in the community PLN to notice its residents for some events, the announcement could be kept forever on the PLN to let the residents check for it anytime. The manager does not need to worry about the announcement would disappear so that the residents miss the information. Because the PLN in social media has powerful transmissibility of information, so the social media could help expand education and associated communications as well. As Chapter 6 mentions that PLN in social media could help the students “to collaboratively explore, negotiate, and develop authentic and sustainable knowledge “(Veletsianos, G, 2010). It breaks the wall of traditional education in classroom and brings more diverse knowledge for students to learn. For example, students could obtain new knowledge from academic accounts in social media. If the student is a medico and doing researches for breast cancer, he/she could collect more knowledge and information through American cancer society official account in Twitter. This is one way to expand education outside classroom. To expand educational communications with social medias, I think EDCI 338 is an excellent example. Students could express their thoughts with each other for a same topic through Mattermost, and their different perspectives could be seen and commented by others. The educational communications are built and increased by the process of exchanging ideas and commenting on the posts. However, the PLN is a wide-range and complex information network, it could help the development of thoughts and ideas in education discourse but also could hinder it. As I mention the medico example above, the medico actually could obtain new knowledge from social medias such as Twitter, he/she could develop thoughts and ideas through new findings and display in his report. However, because social media is a public platform, so all kinds of information have possibilities to appear in PLN. The information may be real or fake. The fake information may hinder the development of thoughts and ideas in education discourse because the learning of fake knowledge would guide the students to the wrong directions of critical thinking, they may be misled by false news and produce confusion in the following study. Because the PLN is “in the critical consumption, production, connection, and synthesis of knowledge through the shared development of learning networks.” (Veletsianos, G, 2010), so the awareness opportunities in education could be raised. The process of learning knowledge in PLN is like a cycle and circulate at the order of finding resources, receiving information, absorbing knowledge and finally spreading the resources again. Through this process, students could have more opportunities to discover and connect with new knowledge because the diversity of social medias, and finally spread the knowledge to others to learn. In this way, more and more people could get opportunities to contact with new knowledge for education. The social media currently plays an important role in education. For example, as Brad Baker mentions in the video that social media “is the authentic voice allows the real story to be told” (7:58). Indigenous people are able to tell their stories and say what they want to say through social medias without bias or racialized. People could understand more about indigenous people according to their true stories instead of half-truths that have changed hands many times. The true knowledge of indigenous group could provide other groups with correct cognition in education, the inclusiveness would become stronger when the other groups know who the indigenous people really are. I think the progress of inclusiveness represents the progress of education. However, as I mention before that the problem of using social media communications in education is the large amounts of information mixed together. Sometimes students cannot identify the authenticity of the information and accidentally choose the fake one. The fake information always affects the continuous study of the students because the fake things always lead to confusions.
Brad B. “EDCI 338 – BRAD BAKER”, YouTube, uploaded by MILLER, 5 Mar, 2021 of publication, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy63SmEpvCw
Veletsianos, G. (2010). Emerging Technologies in Distance Education. AU Press. Chapter 6. pp. 128-138.