Amir Noor

Week 2: Digital Identity, Privacy, and Inclusion

July 22, 2026 / / 0 Comments

The platforms I use most to build a professional network are LinkedIn, Github, Discord, Teams and Zoom. LinkedIn Helps me connect with people, find recruiters, see hackathons, and build a professional profile for myself. I use Github usually to show real work. It helps me contribute to open source projects, and gives other people a way to look at my actual technical skills. Discord is big part of my collaboration stack, because that is where teammates ask quick questions, share files, and hop on calls. Teams and Zoom I used more in direct office work, because that is where actual meetings, updates, and support happen. Looking at my map, the main way I could expand my PLN is not by joining random new platforms, but by being more active on LinkedIn and engaging more with people outside my immediate circle.

Digital Identity and Privacy

I think I have done a decent job of separating personal and professional spaces, and that helps because my professional platforms give employer something directly useful to gauge my hard and soft skills. They can see projects, work experience, and how I communicate. But at the same time, the Digital Tattoo reading made me think more realistically about privacy, even if I separate accounts, I still do not fully control what other people post, tag or share about me.

Privacy and security can limit PLN because they make you more cautious, but they can also strengthen it because they force you to be intentional in your interactions online. It makes you realize the real life consequences of your online presence. As a computer science student, I already think a lot about secure and non-secure systems, so I naturally take extra precautions while trying to present a genuine version of myself online.

Inclusion, Communication and Community

My PLN is fairly diverse because it comes from difference places, computer science, gaming communities, hackathons, coding competitions, work experience, and the people I have met through those spaces. I have talked to people from very different backgrounds, it stops me from thinking narrowly. But this week made me think more seriously about inclusion. Networking is a way to find opportunities and improve my own work, but also a good PLN should make space for other perspectives, The reading from One Without the Other connected with that for me because is inclusion is not just about having different people around. It is about whether their voices actually matter in the conversation.

One real learning outcome from my PLN is that better work usually comes from listening to people outside your own field. During my co-op and in technical projects, I saw that if you only think like a developer, you can build the product correctly and still build the wrong product for the people who need it.

Social media helps communication by making it easier to reach people, and build community without distance being a problem but it creates its own challenges because text removes tone, body language and context. Things get misunderstood easily online. That is why I do not think is automatically inclusive because many people can join. It becomes inclusive only when people are actually head and credited. That also means my PLN should not just promote my own work. It should amplify other voices too, especially when other people have more direct experience or a better perspective on the issue being discussed.

My thinking about PLNs has changed in a lot in these two weeks. I still see them as useful for professional growth, but now I think a strong PLN also needs privacy awareness, diversity, and accountability. The biggest benefit of a diverse and inclusive PLN is that it helps you understand people better, communicate better, and build better work experience. It makes the network actually valuable, and not just large.

Sources:

UBC Digital Tattoo: https://digitaltattoo.ubc.ca/quizzes/privacy-and-surveillance/

Visitor and Resident Maps: https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/7802/6515

Shelley Moore and Leyton Schnellert, One Without the Other: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uvic/reader.action?docID=4832579&p

Week 1: Building Digital Identity and Personal Learning Network

July 16, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Due to the nature of my major, I used to think of social media mostly as a place to advertise yourself, your skills, and your projects for future jobs. A big part of that is still true, but after the Week 1 readings I think that view is too limited. Social media is not only a place to present yourself. It is also a place where you build a personal learning network.

Most of the learning I have done happened online first. I started by watching YouTube videos on Photoshop, then I got interested in game development in high school, and from there I moved into coding, databases, and building projects. That is why the idea of a PLN makes sense to me. The FutureLearn reading explains a PLN as the network of people, digital tools, and information sources we use to learn both online and offline. That feels accurate to how I already learn. For me that network looks like Youtube, Github, Discord, StackOverflow, documentation, forum, and the people I meet through them.

This connects to the Rajagopal reading because a PLN is not just a random list accounts. It is something you build, maintain, and actually use when you need to learn. A lot of learning comes from hands-on problem solving and making use of all the available resources online such as tutorials, documentation, communities, and people who are more experienced than you.

For me, that makes the networking part of social media much more real than how it appears to be. Open Source Projects on Github are a good example of that, because they let people contribute to real large scale projects, ask questions, and slowly build credibility and skills through actual participation instead of being merely an observer of emerging technology.

Discord is another big part of collaboration stack, where you ask quick questions, share files, and work together with people in real time. One can switch between serious work to multiplayer games and casual talks, which further build trust.

The digital identity part of this week made me think more about how personal and professional identities blend online, even when we try to keep them separate. Friends, recruiters, and even complete strangers can all come across different part of the same online presence and form an impression of who we are. That can be powerful because it allows our ideas to reach people we may never have met otherwise, creating opportunities that would have been almost impossible before social media. At the same time, that reach can work against us because we do not fully control what others post, tag us in, screenshot or share, and once something begins spreading, it can move far beyond the audience it was meant for and lose it’s original meaning along the way.

That idea became more visible when I looked at the Microsoft Messenger study. Microsoft researchers analyzed billions of conversation between millions of users and found that people were only about 6.6 steps apart on average. What matters to me is not just the number itself, but what it says about online spaces. If people are that closely connected, then a post, a comment, or even a screenshot can move much farther than we expect. The same network that helps someone find opportunities, also lets out-of-context information spread just as quickly. That is why building digital identity is not just about looking professional. It is about being intentional with what you share, who you learn from and how you act in public spaces.

I still think social media can help advertise your skills, especially in a field like computer Science. But now I see that as only one part of it. The more important part is that it gives you access to knowledge, collaboration, and people. A good PLN is not about having the most accounts or the most followers. It is about having useful connections and knowing how to learn through them.

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