Diverse PLN Benefits: How does having a diverse PLN improve your learning and personal/professional growth? Share any experiences or examples you have.

Having a diverse PLN is super important in today’s society. A diverse PLN is great for personal/professional growth by providing global access to different perspectives, ideas, and resources. Having a diverse PLN allows people to connect with different cultures, giving them a unique perspective and better problem-solving skills because different viewpoints are highlighted. Having a diverse PLN allows for more opportunities and better growth/connections in the future. It is crucial to have a diverse PLN because it can help to build a supportive network, allowing for advice from others and a sense of mentorship. This allows you to be able to better connect with others.

Photo by Mimi Thian on Unsplash

Creating an Inclusive PLN: What steps can you take to ensure your PLN includes various voices and perspectives? Think about actions you can take to promote inclusivity

There are many different steps to ensure diversity and inclusivity in PLN’S. For instance, it is important to actively seek out different opinions/ideas. Making an effort to follow different cultures, backgrounds, and expertise levels allows you to create a more inclusive PLN. Being mindful of this helps to promote inclusivity. Another action to promote inclusivity includes joining various diverse groups and communities. This allows one to learn and engage with others, hearing different viewpoints and knowledge from professionals. Joining online communities is very easy, and you can join communities from anywhere in the world. These things all help to create different perspectives, emphasizing diversity and inclusivity in PLN’S.  Check out this cool video below giving ideas on how to overcome diversity in the business world! The ideas here can be transformed to online PLN’S to support inclusivity.

video by: AACSB International

Challenges of Inclusivity in Digital Spaces: What difficulties have you faced, or do you think you might face, in making your PLN inclusive? Consider ways to overcome these challenges and build a supportive and inclusive PLN.

I think some challenges that I have faced with making my PLN inclusive is some unconscious bias that I have. For instance, Instagram tailors a feed based on pictures and videos that I am interested in. This limits my viewpoints and perspectives because I only see videos of people who have similar life experiences to me etc. This hinders my PLN diversity, reinforcing existing perspectives. I try to overcome these challenges by purposefully looking to connect with diverse individuals so that I can have a more inclusive feed. Another challenge in creating an inclusive PLN is language barriers. For instance, I would love to understand more languages so I could connect and learn knowledgeable information from others. I know there are various communities that I would be interested in joining, but it is hard to do because I don’t understand the language. This is something challenging to overcome, but I have become motivated to learn more French and Italian on apps like Duolingo. Learning new languages is an important skill, that can help support an inclusive PLN.

Check out this website here from Oxford on how to overcome language barriers!