Leaving the Cave: How My Thinking About PLNs Changed
When I started this course, I didn’t know what a PLN was. When I looked into it, I found that the biggest parts of mine were YouTube (mostly The Organic Chemistry Tutor), AI for quick searches and my professors at UVic. Recently, reading philosophy books has also become part of my personal learning network.
What shifted my thinking was reading Plato’s Republic, specifically the allegory of the cave. Prisoners have been chained in a dark cave since childhood, facing a wall. Behind them, people carry puppets past a fire, and the prisoners think the shadows are real because it’s all they’ve ever known. One prisoner breaks free and climbs out. When he goes back to tell the others, they don’t believe him and threaten to kill him if he tries to free them. I think the cave represents the comfort of ignorance and the echo chamber, and an algorithm feed is very similar. Bartlett, Marshall and Marshall describe “Two-Eyed Seeing,” Mi’kmaw Elder Albert Marshall’s idea that no one has the whole picture. If you only use TikTok or the same few people for most of your learning, you’re only getting information through “one eye.” A more diverse PLN gives you more eyes. Plato is a good example of this for me, since he lived about 2,400 years ago in a completely different world, but I still learned a lot from him.
When the Digital Tattoo quiz on the digital divide ended, it asked me which side of the divide I felt I belonged on. This wasn’t hard for me to judge. I have a phone, laptop, iPad, stable wifi, and a UVic login that gives me access to paywalled books. Almost my whole PLN depends on that access. Since many people don’t have as much access, building a diverse PLN can be much harder for them. I have the privilege of access to a much larger range of information.
Overall, I think my PLN has been built around the same comfortable sources for a long time, sort of like staying in the cave. Shelley Moore writes that everyone has strengths and that diversity isn’t something we add, it’s already there. I think it’s a detriment to yourself to limit your learning to a few perspectives. It’s important to challenge your own thoughts by listening to people who differ from you, and to push away that comfortable ignorance.
What’s something you’ve read or experienced that challenged your perspective? With social media being mostly short form content, and algorithms designed to hold your attention by showing you what you want to see, do you think it’s harder to build a diverse PLN today than it was in the early days of the internet?
Sources
- Moore, S. (2016). One Without the Other: Stories of Unity Through Diversity and Inclusion. Portage & Main Press.
- Bartlett, C., Marshall, M., & Marshall, A. (2012). Two-Eyed Seeing and other lessons learned within a co-learning journey of bringing together indigenous and mainstream knowledges and ways of knowing. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, 2, 331–340.
- Digital Tattoo. The Digital Divide and You.