Competence in Working Life and Networks
– Professional Teacher training
Social media in (business /work / education) networking? Pros and Cons.
Class Session
1. Bastu: Outline some theoretical background for (social) networking.
Some buzz words and catch phrases:
Social network theory
Network analysis
Human biology & behaviour
2. Tree: Social media in (business /work / education) networking? Pros and Cons. (FB, Insta, Twitter, Snatchat…)
Give examples.
3. Owl: What are the absolute musts in networking for a (vocational/professional) teacher? Give examples and reasons and benefits.
Competence in working life and networks was the theme of the week. Three teams covered all the aspects of the theme very elegantly.
The idea of having a guest lecturer to come and discuss about Networking was well intentioned and made sense by team Owl. The pre-task regarding this guest lecturer concept was vague and did not make sense at first. Only after an email with questions I was able to get a reply that made sense to me. So, I made a video as asked. Yet, during the lecture I was suddenly given options to either use a video or speak with the camera ON. I can not understand what was the reason behind asking us to make video and then change minds in the last minute and give options of using a video or skip it.
I can understand that teams can use pre-tasks to get the audience interact more but then you should be able to clearly define the purpose of asking to do something and then stick to it. The idea was good but you need to work on your execution so everything goes as planned.
Team Bastu covered different theories regarding Network. This was very interested and will help in my professional life as a vocational teacher.
My team Tree was given a task to discuss about social media networks in Business, work and education. We were also asked to discuss Pros and Cons of social media in networking.
There are some obvious answers to our questions. When it comes to social media we immediately think of opinions that are based on personal use and through media news outlets. Your opinions of social media are mostly correct. But if you think that social media only makes us less intelligent than you might be wrong.
Our findings showed that social media when used properly can benefit companies, institutes and individuals. Laos social media makes people intelligent, those who interact with it to do business. Overall, networking through social media is very important for everyone who wants to do business and work in communities all over the world. There are more pros than Cons of using social media to network.
Personal Networking
Personally, I think social media is to be used for socialising. Only when it comes to Linkedin I can say that I have used it to reach to a community to share my blog posts on Process facilitation. Through this I was also able to find few communities on Facebook where I posted my blogs and received healthy response. Did I make friends within these communities? No. I did not make many friends but only 1. In Peru she is working as a facilitator and she read my blog posts and contacted me once.
However, in one of my master degree classes I met a fellow student who took interest in my ideas and we still keep in contact and share our common interests.
I can safely say that as a student if you manage to discuss about your ideas with others and find someone who takes interest in your ideas then this is much better then finding someone online which the chances are you will not meet personally. Personal interaction is for me always a better option to network with like minded people.
Reflection
Adobe Connect did not work for me this time and it just made my talk less affective. When someone in the middle of your conversation tells you that we can not hear you half of the time then one can imagine the moral going down. I started to forget that technology can sometimes stops working and i should not rely on it. I should have kept myself intact and keep on talking like before. But I could only think that if my listeners are able to listen to me or not. So, my experience was not so good. I could feel that there was urgency in my talk and I tried to finish fast. I was speaking fast and was not in a rhythm like the last time. I was not able to get an interaction that I wanted from my audience this time. Do I blame my audience or myself or the technology, I don’t know at this point. I can only think to improve myself in a situation where technology stops working.
Do you have ideas on what to do in the situations like these?