PLN & Education
When I saw “PLN & Education” as the section title I assumed this one would feel the least relevant to me out of everything so far, since teaching isn’t the career path I’m headed toward. Turns out Dyer’s talk made the case that this stuff applies whether or not you’re actually going into education, and it ended up being one of my favourite readings so far.
His whole argument is that the online and offline worlds aren’t actually separate anymore, the wall between them is porous and shifting, not solid, and trying to prop that wall back up is a losing battle. He pointed out that literally every new communication medium has gone through this same panic, the printing press was accused of ruining communication, so was the telephone, so were comic books and video games, and yet language keeps surviving and evolving anyway. That genuinely made me feel better about how much time I spend on TikTok, every generation has had its version of “this new thing is changing everything” and somehow we keep figuring it out.
A PLN helps education discourse specifically by pulling that wall down instead of reinforcing it, connecting learners to formats and people a single classroom couldn’t offer on its own. It hinders that same discourse when educators go the other direction, insisting the old offline norms are just objectively better, which according to Dyer is both untrue and a waste of energy. His actual advice for educators is refreshingly simple and honestly kind of hopeful, stop pretending there’s a hard line between “digital natives” and “digital immigrants” and just learn alongside students instead, since kids didn’t understand social media instinctively either, they learned it the same way everyone learns anything.
A chapter from this week’s readings, by Laouris and colleagues on structured dialogue and wikis in education, backs this up from a totally different angle, describing Couros’s approach of opening his own classroom up to his personal learning network, and the Flat Classroom Project, which linked classrooms in different countries into one shared virtual space so students could actually work with peers they’d never otherwise meet. That’s such a cool use of the internet, connecting kids across borders to build something together rather than just consume content passively.
Dyer’s specific classroom examples were the part that really sold me on the whole idea, teaching Shakespeare through tweets, poetry through Vine, art through Instagram and Snapchat, letting students learn about harder topics like sex and drugs through peer-made YouTube content instead of solely from a teacher standing at the front of a room. None of that replaces the actual material, it just gives it a shape students already know how to engage with, which genuinely makes a lot of sense to me. The wiki reading adds the collaborative side of this, describing how a shared wiki lets a whole class build a knowledge base together, where the quiet student who never raises their hand gets just as much weight as the student who always answers first, because it all gets folded into the same shared document. That one actually hit close to home, I’m very much the person who never raises their hand in class, so the idea of a format where my contribution counts just as much without me having to speak up first genuinely appeals to me.
Dyer also made a point that stuck with me, most social media research and coverage just generalizes everything down to Facebook and Twitter, when really every platform is asking something completely different of the people using it and shaping identity in a different way. Lumping Vine, Snapchat, LinkedIn, and YouTube all into one blob called “social media” misses a lot of what makes each of them actually interesting. On the more practical side, the wiki reading listed some real problems too, wikis can feel impersonal since there’s no actual face involved, they can lack real discussion, and it’s surprisingly easy for one student to accidentally overwrite someone else’s contribution. There’s also a straightforward tech literacy barrier, one project mentioned in the reading hit a wall specifically because participants weren’t comfortable with the tools yet, not because the ideas were bad.
The part of Dyer’s talk that actually reshaped how I think about my own online presence was his use of Goffman’s idea that identity is basically a performance shaped by whatever stage and props are available to you. Different platforms genuinely bring out different versions of a person, not because anyone’s being fake, just because the format itself shapes what you can even say. That lines up really well with my own Visitor/Resident map from last week, Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn all pull a slightly different version of me out, and I actually like that framing, it makes the whole thing feel less like inconsistency and more like range.
On the “which platforms are actually good for this” question, Dyer’s research found something I wasn’t expecting, young people did better presenting their identity on more restrictive platforms like Instagram or Snapchat than on open-ended ones like Google Plus, since the built-in limits gave them something to work within instead of a blank, intimidating canvas. For actual collaborative or project-based learning, the wiki reading makes a strong case for wikis and shared docs specifically, since they let a whole class build something together instead of just broadcasting content one direction.
This week’s material also raised another layer to all this, calling out healthcare, education, and law specifically as fields where you’re working with a vulnerable population, and where your social media presence needs to be vettable, meaning someone could actually look at it and trust what they see, not just that it performs well. That’s a genuinely different bar than most personal social media has to clear, and it means clear boundaries, careful privacy habits, and following whatever rules govern that specific field, plus being honest with yourself about which platform is personal and which one is professional.
None of this is really about education specifically for me, but it’s a good reminder that whatever field I end up in within biology will probably come with its own version of that same standard eventually. Worth thinking about now rather than figuring it out the hard way later.
References
Dyer, H. (2016). Incorporating & accounting for social media in education [TEDx talk]. TEDxNorwichED. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZteEZbAtsNI
Laouris, Y., Underwood, G., Laouri, R., & Christakis, A. (2010). Structured dialogue embedded within emerging technologies. In G. Veletsianos (Ed.), Emerging technologies in distance education (pp. 153–173). AU Press.