Most of us already use social media daily, but there’s a difference between scrolling and mining. Social media mining means treating a platform like LinkedIn as a deliberate research tool — searching hashtags, tracing who follows and reposts whom, and cross-checking a voice’s credibility before letting it shape how you think about your field. For instructional technologists and educators, this matters because the field moves fast, and a well-built personal learning network (PLN) can surface practical, current expertise that a textbook simply can’t keep pace with (Carpenter & Krutka, 2015).
I mapped my own LinkedIn network onto an infographic, styled as an electrical one-line diagram, since that’s the visual language I actually use in my day job estimating electrical systems for construction projects. The diagram treats me as a “source panel” feeding into two “load centers” — Megan Torrance and Julie Dirksen — with their affiliations (TorranceLearning, the eLearning Guild, ATD, DevLearn) branching off as secondary connections. That’s genuinely how a PLN behaves: you don’t just follow a person, you inherit a slice of their network too.
The infographic also walks through how I evaluated whether these two voices were worth following in the first place, using Mike Caulfield’s SIFT method — Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, Trace claims back to their origin (Caulfield, 2019). That framework matters because LinkedIn, like any platform, rewards confident-sounding posts regardless of whether they’re actually well-supported.
A few tips if you’re building out your own PLN:
- Don’t just follow the person — check who they’re connected to and what those connections say about their standing in the field.
- Weigh comment quality over comment count. A handful of substantive replies from known practitioners tells you more than a viral like count.
- Cross-reference claims against a second source before treating them as established practice.
- Give it time. A useful PLN is built through sustained engagement, not a one-time follow.
If you want to see the full breakdown, the infographic is below.
References
Carpenter, J., & Krutka, D. (2015). Engagement through microblogging: Educator professional development via Twitter. Professional Development in Education, 41(4), 707–728. https://doi.org/10.1080/19415257.2014.939294
Caulfield, M. (2019, June 19). SIFT (The Four Moves). Hapgood. https://hapgood.us/2019/06/19/sift-the-four-moves/
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