Community Contribution #3

This week I found it very insightful to reflect on how challenging it can be to cultivate a truly diverse and inclusive Personal Learning Network. Building a PLN on social media gives us access to ideas from all over the world, but I believe creating a network that is genuinely diverse and inclusive is a lot harder than it looks. A challenge that immediately came to mind is that we often pick up biases without even realizing it. I think social media algorithms make it easy to fall into these bubbles where we only follow people who think like us, which repeats the same pattern of thinking rather than expanding different perspectives. Another issue is that people can build fake networks that look diverse online but aren’t in real life. For example, influencers on social media these days seem to promote brands and companies that value diversity and inclusivity to appear socially conscious and progressive, when in reality, these people are promoting these brands for their own monetary value. I think that this is important to recognize when looking at your own personal learning network in order to identify others’ motives. 

As someone who is mixed, this topic feels personal to me because I’m already used to navigating different cultural perspectives in my daily life. In my PLN, I want to apply that same mindset by practicing “Two-Eyed Seeing”, a principle that encourages us to look at issues through multiple distinct lenses and value different ways of knowing side-by-side instead of just one lens (Bartlett et al., 2012). From my own experience, I can see how this mindset allows our thinking to expand and grow. In order to address fake or performative diversity, we have to move away from treating social media as a digital “container” where diverse voices are just gathered without real connection. As Shelley Moore (2016) explains, genuine inclusion isn’t just about sharing space; it requires creating a “place with purpose,” where every member is valued and presumed competent. If we can examine our own biases and distinguish between authentic relationships and surface-level representation, I believe our PLNs can evolve our learning. 

References

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(4), 331–340.

Moore, S. (2016). One Without the Other: Stories of Unity Through Diversity and Inclusion. Portage & Main Press.