Community Contribution #2

So before I plotted my active platforms onto the mapping exercise, I wanted to make sure I understood each of the four groups so that when I did include the digital platforms I used, they actually made sense to me. I started with the handful I use every day, which as I previously mentioned in Community Contribution #1 was Google, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, and Reddit. As you can see from my map, Twitter and Youtube are in the highest possible corners of their respective groups but are on opposite sides. Twitter is a platform I use daily that I constantly interact with different communities on, while youtube is something I use for personal gain but don’t do much interacting besides maybe adding a video to “watch later”. After I set these two down, the rest were a lot easier to gauge.

What stood out to me after finishing the map was the difference between my personal and institutional sides. Most of the platforms I use for school or professional purposes are closer to the visitor side, with Microsoft Teams being the one exception since we use it for this class to interact with one another and post our assignments. LinkedIn stood out to me quite a bit because even though it will become increasingly important as I get closer to graduating and looking for work, I barely use it. This is the area where I can start expanding my PLN by attempting to connect with some old coworkers from my previous co-op jobs, and maybe some of my past class mates who I got along with and now had some of the same life goals. I still don’t totally understand how the platform works, but I don’t see myself becoming someone who starts regularly posting on LinkedIn. With that being said, my first step will start with becoming more active and trying to make the most out of the connections I already have, and hopefully my presence/profile on LinkedIn will build from there.

I also took the time to search my own name purely out of curiosity, I’m not an overly private person when it comes to online information, but I wasn’t expecting anything major to come up. As I expected, the only things I found were my LinkedIn and my old hockey stats page from when I was 17-19. Considering how active I am online, I’m quite pleased to know there isn’t a whole bunch of public information/personal activity connected to my name. I also think this could be a bit of a double edged sword, because while it is nice to know that my personal life isn’t super easy to find, it also means I have little to no professional presence online (outside of my scarce LinkedIn profile). I don’t really want these two sides of my life to overlap that much, especially on the internet, but I do want to try and build a more serious and impactful professional profile for myself that potential employers could use to possibly boost my chance of landing a job in the future.