Please no more chocolate eggs.  As I’m writing this blog post, I’m nursing a cold and munching on Easter eggs that I found at the back of the kitchen pantry.  You do understand that they had to be eaten right?

So it’s that time of the month where again I write about what I’ve been up to….what I have been working on…. and what has inspired me.

Casey Nietstat Breaks Into My Morning Routine

The ONE thing that stands to mind is that I discovered the vlogs of Casey Niestat.  You may have read my blog post called Do You Work Out Loud? that included a video on Casey’s Wildly Functional Studio.  It’s safe to say that his work has seriously made me think and question a lot of things about my own work and my own workplace.

My new routine every morning includes watching his vlog now.  At exactly 9am when I sit down in front of my computer and drinking my my cup of coffee, I ask myself, “Right, let’s see what Casey is up to”.

His short videos are now my own intro before I start any of my own work.  I’m amazed at his tenacity, patience and work ethic for creating mini movies of his entire day – the people he meets, the things he sees on the streets of New York and the little ‘time outs’ he takes away from the office to take snapshots of the city skyline. I wish him all the best in his new business adventures and look forward to “feeling as if” I’ve been part of his journey as a viewer watching a business idea come into fruition.

Who would have thought that ‘working out loud’ was a spectator sport?

Dr Henry Woo Rocks

Secondly, I’ve been reading and lurking into other industries because there’s a whole world of people out there who are doing FABULOUS things that I don’t know about.

Later this year, I will be running a workshop with medical and health professionals so I needed to understand a bit about their field, their environment, their challenges…  I stumbled upon the Twitter account of Sydney urologist Dr Henry Woo through a work out loud series by Real Scientists .  Every week, a chosen scientist tweets what they’re doing and working on for that week.  (This week it’s Adam Marcus, a Cancer Biologist – not his star sign – well, who knows, it could be –  but he’s a biologist who’s fighting cancer). See his Twitter account at @notmadscientist  and follow him as he’s trying to get to 1000 followers.

The Real Scientists Blog and tweets are a BRILLIANT IDEA for working out loud.  I can see applications for the corporate context. Imagine the c-suite leaders doing the same in their organisations on their social enterprise platforms.

Anyhow…

Now what surprised me about Dr Woo, is that he uses social tools such as his blog, Twitter and in particularly, Vine to narrate his work and share to the world.  However, this month I was interested in something else that has had the Twitterverse abuzz.

This month, he experimented with Periscope, the real time live streaming video app.  His post on Urologists in the Yellow Submarine – a Periscope to the World explained how he used this live streaming tool at the recent Urological Society of Australia and New Zealand’s (USANZ) Annual Scientific Meeting.  He believes he may have been the first medico to use this tool at a medical conference in the world. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this was the case.

Regardless, the point is that I’m no urology expert.  In fact, before Dr Woo, urology never entered my mind (and may I never want it too frankly) but the point is that through his blogs and social media use, he has shared his work, knowledge and learning openly to others.  He is not only an example to his own field but to others like myself, in Learning and Development and in the business world.

We can learn so much from each other through working out loud and starting conversations with people outside of our field. It’s not about the urology.  It’s about experiences and insights in our own work that we can share on our blogs, our tweets, our interactions with people so that we can then bring back these ideas to our own work and context to create something new and innovative.  That’s what I love.  This is social learning.

Activate My Learning

This month I came up with an idea called “Activate My Learning“. At the start of every month, I will email four tools, tips and apps related to social learning or networking.  That’s one app per week to try out and experiment and people can showcase their work on Twitter through #activatemylearning.  I’ve been having fun learning how to use Mail Chimp and creating the templates for every month as well as revisiting many of the tools that I have used and experimented with myself.  I hope that you can join in on this. Let’s bring back the joy to learning!

On a Light Hearted Note

In my foray lurking into medical and health related tweets, I stumbled upon this legend called ZDoggMD (yes, a medico who educates through his musical parodies).  It just goes to show that everyone has creative skills and sets about to educate others in different ways.  To me, these videos are also another way of working out loud!

So that’s my month!  Sure, I did a lot more in-between but these have been stand out moments. Hope you had a great month of learning.

Right, let’s bring on May.