I started to use Snapchat again after a long break over January as I was doing a lot of soul-searching about my independent consulting career and instead focussed on “slow reading” to get my mind on other things. (My definition of this is blocking out 5-6 hours in the day to read without any distractions).
The reason I use Snapchat is because I can quickly capture images, video, annotate and create a storyline on what it is that I’m working on, learning about and connecting with.
In effect, it’s a visual representation of my thinking.
Of course, blogging is by far, my main sense-making tool, however Snapchat allows me to express myself in my own unique and quirky way. Many times, the irony isn’t lost on me that if I do this, that somehow, I’m not meeting people’s expectations of being “professional, business-like and serious” when it comes to the world of corporate learning.
But that’s not me. I don’t like to follow what others are doing because not only does it feel fake, I’m simply not being true to myself or my clients.
So for the last couple of weeks, I’ve revisited my Snapchat channel and come up with a program of daily content that I can share that relates the visual stories of what I’m learning and working on and in the process, hope to show and teach others so that they become confident to try to learn something new every day – and then share that.
This week here’s a snippet of what I have been getting up to.
Monday 21 February 2017
I organised a Third Place meetup (a social networking group I founded in 2014) to co-work at a new community space in the Docklands called Knowledge Market.
Tuesday 22 February
I took a trip out to my university campus and down memory lane. Who was I to know that I stumbled smack bang into O-Week (Orientation Week) and the campus filled with young students all excited about spending the next 3-4 years on undergraduate study? I discovered the Monash Club which is a club for post graduate students, Monash Alumni and staff (I meet that criteria) and spent an afternoon there to review Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto for Tuesday Book Club.
Wednesday 23 February 2017
It was Work Out Loud Wednesday and I shared a project that I’m working on with Marilyn Snider to form a local knitting group. Many people over the years have been asking us to teach them how to knit and we found that we were sharing our knowledge, showing our work, using different tools like video, WhatsApp and Facebook to show them how to cast on stitches, read patterns and many other knitting complexities. So Marilyn thought it would be a great idea to create a Social Learning group so that we can use our skills to teach others. Of course, I thought it was a brilliant idea!
Thursday 24 February 2017
This week the general theme of tweets and articles I was reading related to learning a new concept by explaining it to a 5 year old. This was the idea of Richard Feynman, an American scientist. The snaps I shared today was talking about the four steps of the Feynman Learning Technique and it was lucky that some of the filters on Snapchat were used to explain the concept even further.
Friday 24 February 2017
Friday is usually reserved for sharing the snapcodes of people to follow on Snapchat who show and share their work OR who are using Snapchat in fields of learning, education, personal and career development. There’s also a Frozen Snap involved somewhere. I won’t post it here because it’s really a bit of fun for me…but feel free to follow me on Snapchat. Just scan the code below!
