Reading this Reader was a challenge! There so many new terms and theories to digest, but I'm hoping that everything will become much clearer and understood once I start exploring them...
PROFESSIONAL NETWORK is a work related community held together by either close affiliation or more distant but common work interests.
! Your effective engagement of your PN may well impact on your success, promotion and development, your sense of worth and fulfilment, and even enjoyment in your working life.
! It can also produce benefits for you personally and the things that matter to you.
THEORIES OF PROFESSIONAL NETWORK
1. COOPERATION
Is an act or instance of working or acting together for a common purpose or benefit; joint action. 'The will and way to Win'. This relates enormously to our Professional Practice and the interaction we have with our Professional Networks.
As human we can be incredibly selfish and we forget that without the people that truly love and care about us we wouldn't last a day on this planet. Can you think of a person in your life that gives you everything without asking anything in return? Now ask yourself if you would hesitate to offer something to that person. Nothing compares to this relationship between you; is surrounded by a sense of trust, love, commitment and respect.
So how does this relate to our Professional Networks and the impact they have in our Professional Practice? The key word is ' Tit for Tat', to give and receive; If you apply this in your Professional Practice it can open a lot of doors in your career. By Interacting within your Professional Networks and by being an active member, your Colleagues will know Who to approach and they'll Remember You if something related to you appears. This means being popular in your field, and by being well known you immediately gain respect, your word counts and you are a trustworthy member of the group.
Although this could be very benefitial, it could also turn against you if you can't 'see' who's playing a game behind your back, and who's determined to keep everything for themselves. This requires experience and the ability to be critical. Is like being a pawn on a chessboard; You can either hide behind other pawns and hope not to get defeated, make a move and be open to sacrifice yourself for the sake of your team, attack by yourself and hope to win or make the right move and cooperate to beat the opponent! IT'S YOUR CHOISE.
2. AFFILIATION
Is a...
1. Concept in the field of social phychology that seeks to explain How humans enjoy and benefit from connections with others and the reasons Why humans 'form close relationships'.
2. Social process that provides us 'with a network of support that will help us when we are in need'.
It is not a coincidence that Hofstede (1980) found that; in individualistic cultures people may develop friendships in a fairly self-serving manner, whereas in collectivist cultures friendships might be more likely to be characterised by selfness and obligation. This confirms that the more we affiliate and interact with our Networks the more engaged we are with the people we want to be surrounded with.
We all need to affiliate, our tendency to form close relationships is an inherited that helps us survive and reproduce. A lack of social and physical contact, adversely affects the ability of the brain and the hormonal system to cope with stress. (Gunnar, 2000)
3. SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM
What Constructionism claims, is that meanings are constracted by human beings as they ENGAGE with the world they are interpreting.
Through our interactions we can make meanings, which might be the VALUES we attribute to a particular network, our preferred WAYS of engaging the network or the extent to which we are willingly to contribute SELFLESSLY to the network.
So Social Constructionism explains:
* How meanings about the world are made
* How we relate to our Networks
* How we make our own connections
In order to become wiser and a master of your profession you NEED to be SOCIAL. No one can succeed by himself, we all need some support and someone to give us the right tools to work with, in order to gain the experience and the confidence to reach our goals. Being social doesn't cost at all, all you need to do is spend some time and show interest in people in your profession. You only have to do this if you feel that you can built a close relationship with those people; there is no point showing interest in someone you don't respect or you didn't have a good relationship with in the past, just because they seem to be popular in your field. Even though you might be a good 'actor' and approach them without showing any bad intentions; eventually the true colours will come to the surface and your true self will be revealed. Building a good image and making sure people have a good impression of you should be your priority.
4. CONNECTIVISM
Connectivism explains how networks both learn and provide the means for individuals to connect and learn.
It suggests that our classrooms, networks, the web are all inhabited with info from which we learn and make sense.
This definition encompasses many of the attributes commonly associated with behaviourism, cognitivism, and constructivism- namely, learning as a lasting changed state ( emotional, mental, physiological) brought about as a result of experiences and interactions with content or other people.
Constructivism suggests that learners create knowledge as they attempt to understand their experiences (Driscoll, 2000) Learning is viewed as a process of inputs, managed in short term memory, and coded for long term recall.
Karen Stephenson states: ''Experience has long been considered the best teacher of knowledge. Since we cannot experience everything, other people's experiences, and hence other people, become the surrogate for knowledge.
Something true but not always noticeable is that; If the underlying conditions used to make decisions change, the decision itself is no longer as correct as it was at the time it was made. So the ability to recognize and adjust to pattern shifts is a key learning task. ''Be informationally open, that is, for it to be able to classify its own interaction with an environment, it must be able to change its structure...''
Finally, the ability to draw distinctions between important and unimportant information is vital. It saves time and money!
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