L.Ecos (re)Inventing Self

TechTrends published “Creating an Intentional Web Presence: Strategies for Every Educational Technology Professional”¹. It concluded with:

“To be a successful, lifelong educational technology professional, you need to be digitally literate and model digital fluency in your day-to-day professional activities, including effectively managing your web presence.” (Dunlap & Lowenthal 2016)

I was honored the authors used my story as a ‘callout’ case study example. At the end I stated, “I developed a twist on the model, marrying the principals of PLN with SEO to result in designing my social learning network…where content curation became crucial as that is how I ‘engaged’ with my community…This is important to me as it establishes me as a lifelong learner and as a global citizen.” (Stitson, 2016)

At the time generative Artificial Intelligence was barely on the global workplace radar. And though I was tracking it when it really hit last year, I have found myself scrambling like a hampster on a wheel keeping up with trends and new technology.

While I had been developing my learning networks according to different areas of interest/professional development, I had not yet fully integrated how to leverage them as an ecosystem which would support rapid growth.

A hampster on a wheel saying "Let me off please"

A personalized learning network ecosystem takes time to cultivate.

Many of the tips outlined in such articles as “Building a Strong Professional Network: Key Strategies for Success” by PMS Consulting or the Forbes 2022 article, “14 Steps To Take To Build A Strong Professional Network” are absolutely amazing for building your professional network, collaboration, and cultivating possibilities. But tips are just tips and following them can equally lead to disaster as success.

For example, Step 1 in the Forbes article states “Start With Intentional LinkedIn Outreach.” Staying connected IS 100% important for both professional development and, I would argue, mental health. However, the tip more or less assumes that you have an understanding how to be prepared to cultivate relationships through your outreach activities. For this reason, I might instead title Step 1 as “Start with you.” #4 in the PMS Consulting is just about that:

Cultivate Existing Relationships: Don’t overlook the importance of nurturing your existing connections. Reach out to former colleagues, classmates, and acquaintances to catch up and share updates about your career. Maintaining these relationships can lead to unexpected opportunities and valuable introductions.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/building-strong-professional-network-key-strategies-success/

Just through stringing these two tips together, it becomes pretty clear that you need a plan.

Who will you reach out to and when? where? how often?
What will you do to honor their time? Prepare? Share? Create space to fully listen?
Why do you connect and nurture relationships? This IS a trick question. Most professional networking tip revolve around what 👉you👈 get out of it. Consider alternatives. Are you mentor, mentee, supportive, or just collaboratively generate 🔥💡momentum💡🔥 for each other?

The L.Ecos to the P.Ecos of my M.Ecos.

Starting with “me”, as in author, guide, regular human making stuff, I decided to develop a plan. One the one side, it is walking my talk. In my case, I have battened down the hatches on creating ‘me’ space so that I can provide ‘we’ space. Mondays I make an effort to be creating instead of hating. Tuesdays I focus on open communications. Thursdays I want to narrow my thoughts so that I can end the week with some food for contemplation through the weekend.

Additionally, I decided to amplify certain paths that merge in my daily work-life/life-life journey, whether I like it or not so why not reflect and share about them in a weekly newsletter?

I am a lover of language origin and history. (My favorite book is “Empires of the World: A Language History of the World.”² Check it out sometime, it’s only 640 pages. 😉)

We are learning all the time. If you are not considering our daily environmental influences, able to effectively curate all the digital content slung at us, being mindful of what we accept as fact and who we tend to listen to regarding all matters, it is impossible to effectively direct your personal learning journeys. If fact, you may not even notice you are on one! Nor are you able to support others along their way.

I googled Lecos which oddly resulted in two interesting results synonymous with anthropogenic change, i.e. the study of environmental changes causes by people. First, LECoS stands for a GIS plug for Landscape Ecology Statistics which really just means land cover analysis. Second, It is the name of people indigenous to Bolivia. As a old anthropologist and lover of the new trends in regenerative agriculture this super thick paper, “Intermediation, Ethnogenesis and Landscape Transformation at the Intersection of the Andes and the Amazon: the Historical Ecology of the Lecos of Apolo, Bolivia.³” was a fascinating skim ( I couldn’t get through it word for word), especially the section, Comparative Historical Ecology of Two Lecos Communities. It is an impressive account about how environment and outside influence can dramatically effect people from the same culture in a completely divergence fashion.

This is pretty heady stuff but worth taking a look at!

P.Ecos – Pecos is simply a river that runs through N.Mexico and Texas, a town, and a USS oiler ship. The historic meaning is “The place where there is water or, according to Urban Dict. “Peco means great, cool, nice, ect.” That works for me because most of what I will write in P.Ecos posts will be about the awesome people I follow, know, as they provide the water that feeds my soul. (I know 🤮 too sentimental)

M.Ecos fortunately has no meaning which is fitting because it really is just about you at the center creating personalized habits, behaviors, and action items that work for YOU. There is no specific prescription to this but, through sharing resources and anecdotes, I hope to help you put together a program that fits your now and techniques to recognize when and how shifts should shift occur (or not!).

[Begin callout] Web Presence in Action Patty’s Story

I understood the power of organic SEO and the importance of a well-designed website when I began my graduate studies in educational technology. In the small business I worked, I had revamped my employer’s website and presence in online directories. As I built more and more websites, I realized that, regardless of the amount of traffic a website has, ANY web presence would increase one’s google ranking and searchability.

Armed with this knowledge and experience, I created an online professional portfolio to showcase some of the work I was doing in my graduate studies. At this point in my studies, I had two websites (patriciastitson.com and modestmedia.com) that were establishing my digital footprint when I began learning more about social media in my coursework. I setup a Twitter account ‘@imightwrite’, a YouTube and Vimeo account, and, of course, Facebook and LinkedIn.

The coursework gave me an opportunity to take a hard look at my digital presence and relate it back to a personal learning network. As I was not a teacher or educator, the idea of a traditional PLN was hard for me to put into practice. This is why I developed a twist on the model, marrying the principals of PLN with SEO to result in designing my social learning network. This is where content curation became crucial as that is how I ‘engaged’ with my community. By utilizing Scoop.it to post to both my blog and Twitter, I was able to quickly reach out and gain notice from people as far away as Norway. This is important to me as it establishes me as a lifelong learner and as a global citizen. [End callout]

Lowenthal, Patrick R.; Dunlap, Joanna C.; and Stitson, Patricia. (2016). “Creating an Intentional Web Presence: Strategies for Every Educational Technology Professional”. TechTrends, 60(4), 320-329. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-016-0056-1 ↩︎
Ostler, N. (2006). Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. Paperback edition. Harper Perennial. ↩︎
Retrieved from https://www.environmentandsociety.org/ ↩︎