Consider our guest and their steps in building a podcast relying on a PLN. Can your PLN be used to help professional development post-course? If yes, how? If not, what limitations exist? Can your PLN be relied on to open professional Opportunities?

I think my PLN can be used to help professional development post-course. Outside the university, I am a free writer on JinJiang net, I am not a very professional writer in the sense that I can make a living out of it, but I still earn a little from my published essays. I didn’t consider the other writers that I know from working in Jinjiang company as my PLN, mainly because I had a very vague idea of how PLN works pre-course. But now I reflect on my working experience with them, I think that I can certainly use social media platforms as a place for me to start expanding my PLN. 

In the interview with Mo Amir, he says he also started his podcast as a hobby/interest, which is similar to my situation now. I don’t depend on my writing to feed myself, and I started writing on Jinjiang simply because a lot of my friends are reading stories and books on it. Here’s a link to Jinjiang: https://www.jjwxc.net/ (written all in Chinese). I have a couple of hundreds of readers every month, and I made friends to some of them. Now inspired by Amir, I am really thinking about the possibility of building a PLN based on what I write. I wrote stories about minority experiences, women in the oppression systems, and I tried to add a little fantasy touch to it so that more readers will want to read it. So my stories are basically fantasies that speak some of the issues in our reality. If anyone is interested, here’s one piece I wrote in English last year: 

The problem for me to build PLN based on my works in Jinjiang is that how can I let my colleagues to engage my works. For example, Amir is doing podcasts, and the nature of this profession can get people to engage in conversation. My work is mostly about individual work, I know there are conferences where writers could go and discuss some of the issues that were discussed in books, but I don’t think my colleague would use their media space as a place for open communication, because writing, in the end, is a personal thing. I guess I will need to think about this question post-course, and hopefully I could really create a PLN based on my work.