I really put off doing this task, I just kept making excuses not to do it. However, I finally knuckled down and read the reader and found that although some of the concepts were difficult to understand sometimes, the theories in it were very interesting. I have learnt that I need to just keep reading even if I don’t fully understand something and don’t get hung up on one sentence that doesn’t make sense to me because more often than not it explains itself further down the page.
Professional networking and affiliation go hand in hand. To have a well established network it goes with out saying that you have to be able to affiliate with a wide range of professionals. The dictionary definition, to affiliate: to attach or unite in terms of fellowship (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/affiliate). This definition tells us that not only do we affiliate in terms of creating professional networks but we start to affiliate or attach ourselves to other people from a very young age. Affiliation is a natural part of life how we affiliate differs across different cultures as well as ones preference and the personality, it is to what extent we affiliate and how we use it to network is how you mould a career. It is not until we leave schooling do we really understand the importance of our established affiliates to help us get on and move up/around the career ladder.
A person can have a number of established networks that may or may not interlink. Personal and professional network often cross due to the fact that professional affiliates can also become close friends. A person may also have groups within their network, for example if one worked within a dance company that group would be a very close sub-network, where as if their next job was with a cruise line there is the opportunity to network with a vast amount of people. These two, what we can call sub-networks merge to create one persons professional network.
Cooperation
The cooperation theory was an easy concept to understand. The use of the game ‘Prisoners Dilemma’ to show how people work I feel was very simple but extremely effective. It shows that in the long run cooperating and working with the other person will reap more benefits even when in the short term, if you win, the benefits look greater. When making the first move in a deal you have to trust that if you do right by the person they will in turn do right by you as pointed out in the game that most human beings will reciprocate what the person before them has done.
Social Constructionism
It took me a while to get my head around this theory, but after reading the section a couple of times it started to make a lot of sense. It is telling us that humans build meaning, it is not just something that appears and has just one level to it, people add meaning so it is continually growing. I think the example given in the reader of the ‘tree’ makes it easy for us to understand the theory so we can apply this logic to any other object, theory, description. When one says think of a tree we do not just think of the object itself we understand that on a simple level a tree is brown and green, then it is made of bark and leaves, then it needs water and sunlight to live, then it’s leaves uses the sunlight to photosynthesise to produce nutrition for the tree to grow, then animals use the tree for food and for their homes. This is just a simple way of showing how many layers humans have constructed to create meaning to a simple thing such as a tree. This then becomes knowledge only when a group of people agrees, through interaction, upon the belief that this meaning is truth. So therefore knowledge is also constructed not created. This brings out the question; without humans would the world have meaning? I don’t know. It is a very similar question to which every one asks; if a tree falls deep in the rain forest and there is no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?
At first I was not sure how this theory was relevant to the topic of networking. However now, upon reading the section again and writing about it, I have come to understand that without networking, communicating with other people there would be no meaning. Knowledge comes from people agreeing upon truth constructed by what humans believe to be meaning, this knowledge could never have happened without interaction between people and therefore networking.
Connectivism
Connectivism is self explanatory in a basic form. It explains how connecting with other people, creating networks and affiliations, helps one to grow as a person, learning from eachother. The gathering of new ideas, building upon other peoples ideas is how new meaning is constructed. This means that the world of meaning is continuously growing and expanding with different schools of thought from such a variety of people, rather than just one person teaching their thoughts.
“over the last 20 years, technology has reorganized how we live, how we communicate, how we learn” (Siemens, G. 2004)
I believe this is very true, especially after researching and learning about web 2.0 in task 1. The internet had made a lot more information accessible to a huge amount of people, the amount of people with that access has increased ten fold in the last 20 years too. Web 2.0 also enables a vast amount of networking, which has increased how much we learn, with ideas and meanings growing and being continually constructed and reconstructed with new information. Connection with a huge range of people within a veriety of living circumstances, cultures and beliefs though this source
Communities of Practice
We need to learn to use our network/afflilations effectively. There is no point in going to the effort of creating a sound network if you are not going to use your contacts to your advantage.
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