It’s All Coming Together This Week, Isn’t It?

As I worked my way through this week to finish up my PLN paper, a quick realization hit me that what we had done in this course for the past few weeks are still pretty vivid in my mind, and perhaps a little more surreal than I had anticipated the learning experience to be. I had similarly completed a 6-week course earlier in the summer (also by Vanessa), but nothing seems like this course in terms of intensity and immersion level. Perhaps it is a case of DOING A LOT in a 6-week period, or a case of back-to-back summer courses, or the way the course is structured which requires us to explore, probe, experiment and report what we have found. Nevertheless, I believe that the consensus in the class is that this experience is refreshing, we had a lot of fun along the way, and we would definitely not want it any other ways.

As I start to recollect what I have learned in order to describe my preferred PLN, another insight that I derived is that you will never know what you can possibly do, or use something to your advantage, until you personally try it. I was indeed pleasantly surprised throughout the course that most of the social media tools that we were exposed to were very interesting and relatively easy to use, and having occupied a huge chunk of my time in the past few weeks, I am certain that some of them would have big parts to play in my life from this point onwards, whether it is as part of my PLN, or as part of an instructional design in my professional life in the near future, or just simply as social media tools that I could use to regulate and enrich my life. Hence, I am pretty glad that I have taken this course, and would definitely cherish my learning experience from the last 6 weeks!  

Medium - A Place Where You Might Just Be Inspired

Last week, we got to respond to Vanessa's #MediumChallenge, and I must say that I really like this tool very much for its unique features. So I tried it out, played around and what I discovered was a tool that has many distinctive attributes when compared with other similar type platforms. 

What is really interesting about this tool is that it not only serve as a blogging and online publishing platform, but there is also a big and diverse collection of journals and genres that one can explore in their area of interest. From this perspective, Medium could also be considered to be performing as a curation and bookmarking tool designed to curate the most appropriate and interesting materials that would naturally find its audience. 

In essence, Medium is a community that offers unique perspectives on ideas, personal thoughts and experiences, and you would often find interactions between writers and readers through the comment features. Such interactions form the basis for knowledge sharing and exchange of ideas on the platform, and certainly one can observe a great sense of appreciation and respect for diverse viewpoints from the responses. 

Medium is also a network that connects writers to readers, as users could follow each other either on their stories, or on the Twitter platform via the simple buttons on the website. In a nutshell, I find the stories on Medium to be extremely inspiring to the point that I have been frequently using the tool the past few days, so it must be a good thing and therefore I have decided to incorporate it as part of my PLN!

Protecting Yourself on Social Media

We all know of the dangers on social media. Despite the various privacy concerns that we constantly face on these social networks which we had used extensively to share our lives with the world, there seems to be no real urgency for most people to take proactive actions in order to mitigate the risks to their privacy on social media. Therefore, I am putting these 6 simple tips out to remind ourselves what we can do to better protect our personal information on social media sites that we frequently use.

1. The first tip is to recognise that nothing is temporary in the online environment. Even if you posted something and delete it later, you will never know if someone has already copied it. Therefore, always think carefully before you put any information out there, especially stuff that is personal to you.

2. Manage your privacy settings. It always pays off in reviewing who you are connecting with, and what information you are sharing with them.

3. Don’t fill out ALL your social media profile. Review your personal profile information and only share things that you deem necessary. Putting your personal phone numbers, birth dates and family details on social media is not exactly the best thing to do if you care about your privacy online.

4. Use strong passwords, change them frequently, and adopt multiple passwords for different social media platforms. This is rather intuitive, as you do not want anyone, in a case of a phishing attack, to lay their hands on your ONE password and the access to all your social media accounts.

5. Turn off location settings on your social media platforms. By default, a lot of such platforms have direct connection to the GPS feature of your mobile devices, revealing your current location unknowingly to strangers who may access your profiles.

6. When you do not need them anymore, remember to CLOSE your old social media accounts and delete as much personal information from them as possible.

Sources:

https://blogs.mcafee.com/consumer/10-tips-protect-social-networks/

http://techland.time.com/2013/07/24/11-simple-ways-to-protect-your-privacy/

Social Media Privacy Policy - Do You Know All Of Them?

In this week, we explore the issues of privacy and ethics on social media. I would say this is a rather important topic that a lot of people unfortunately do not really pay attention to, simply because people are more interested in good "stuff" that social media provide, and more often than not do not give a dime for the safety and security of the information they are sharing on the platforms.

So when was the last time you read a privacy policy of a social media or networking site which you signed up for? In reality, you will be surprised to know that most of the major social media sites which you may be using now are sharing your personal information with third parties. But wait a minute.....did you actually authorize them to do that? OF COURSE YOU DID, the moment you signed up and clicked on that "allow access to your personal information" button during the registration stage.

In fact, there are only TWO platforms - Google and Foursquare, that have stated that they do not share personally identifiable information about their users with advertisers. Then, what about the rest? Which of YOUR information are they sharing with others?

Facebook - We are all big time users of Facebook, but do you know that it is one of the biggest "sharer" of your information with their partners, advertisers and developers?

Twitter - Now who doesn't love to tweet? But do you know that Twitter reserves the right to sell all of your information in case of bankruptcy, sale, merger, or acquisition of the company? Yes, this is right there in the fine prints of its privacy policy that you had agreed on by using the platform.

Pinterest - You have the rights to use the platform to search for resources, curate items or market your products, but Pinterest also has the rights to share your personal information; such as your names, emails, phone numbers, with third party companies.

So are you getting any worried now?

Knowing the privacy policy of the social platforms that you are using may just be the first step to understanding privacy issues on social media, the many threats that you face, how you can manage your privacy control settings on these sites, and ultimately how to protect yourself and your personal information on social media.  




Source:
http://blog.hotspotshield.com/2013/06/25/social-media-privacy-concerns/