Here are this month’s snap stories of personal learning for July 2018.
Every week and every month, I like to review these videos to see what I have been doing every day. It’s a great way to capture all my work and learning – and also to see progress towards my goals.
Every month I allocate an hour to review these daily videos I take on Snapchat and share these here on my blog. I use these videos as an online portfolio of my work – an online CV if you will.
Many of these are not shared across other social networks unless there’s something specific to that particular social media community I’d like to share. In effect, these are my own “sharing of my work out loud” videos and not for the purposes of marketing but rather of personal and professional development.
No specific details about any client work are shown here without their permission. If you would like to know further information about anything I mention in these videos, contact me.
Thursday 5 July 2018
In today’s snap story, I share the excitement of my first day at Adopt and Embrace. It was the first time that during my induction and orientation of a new role, I was actually AT HOME, however, I still managed to get dressed appropriately for an office environment – even though the office was my house. I talk about the need to be able to structure and prioritise my day and to get into a routine that would optimise my performance at home (although that has never been an issue as I do my best work from home).
Friday 6 July 2018
Today I experimented with an introductory video that I put to Hoodoo Gurus music (yes, I know that I’m not allowed to do this. You should see my YouTube infringement notices but I’m slowly sorting these out and changing the music over time). Today I went yarn shopping with my good friend who had discovered a yarn store that does a good basement sale. I come home and share how I edit a couple of reports from Learn Tech Day in Belgium where I gave a full day workshop for LearningNow TV.
Sunday 8 July 2018
Today I decided to spend the day video editing all the footage I took from Belgium and the Netherlands and I do this in iMovie (although I’m fast seeing the need to learn a more sophisticated package). What I like about this day is that I’m seen eating stroopwafels (which I overdosed on while I was over there) and the music “Holiday Road” is on the background. You remember the Chevy Chase Vacation movies? Remember the soundtrack? That. It went into my holiday videos because I felt that at times what I got up to overseas – especially in Amsterdam – was kinda crazy. (No it’s not what you think. We did some CNT News video shooting of my alter ego Shazza Breaknews, Foreign Corespondent doing a report on the changes in drug licences for retail operators). I did go into a coffee shop however just to say that I’ve been in a coffee shop in Amsterdam but no, I did not partake in anything. Seriously, my most dangerous drug for me nowadays is a packet of Tim Tams and a few glasses of a good red wine.
Tuesday 10 July 2018
Today I’m in Brisbane! Hello Brisbane and meeting my Adopt and Embrace team in person. I was very excited to get up there and meet the team and learn more about the company and what everyone does in their role. I take you on a tour of the co-working space that Adopt and Embrace office is based. Our team day includes a photo shoot from the top of our building, a lovely pizza lunch and a great tutorial by Darrell Webster, a Microsoft guru and constant sharer of his knowledge and expertise through all social media, on the 360 camera. (Follow Darrell if you want to know about Microsoft).
Wednesday 11 July 2018
Today I decided to wear my Texan cowboy boots that I bought off a woman’s feet – literally. I went up to her and told her that I’d give her cash for the boots she was wearing. In this story, I share how I’m learning about the Surface Pro and how I need to get organised quickly or risk being overwhelmed with the constant pinging of notifications. I also talk about how different (but similar) consumer and enterprise apps are.
Thursday 13 July 2018
Today I focus on learning OneNote. It’s very similar to Evernote (I’ve been using Evernote Pro for some years) as well as share how information and training is shared behind the scenes when we are working on our funny sideline gig, fake news show CNT.
Saturday 14 July 2018
Oh I’m in experimenting mode in video again and what a doozy! I had to clean the house too so I thought why not do both together? I shot myself cleaning and put it to music and voila. Music clip completed – and you just watched me clean the house. (Yes, more copyright violations).
Monday 16 July 2018
Today I continue talking about my role at Adopt and Embrace and how I’m working my way through Induction and Orientation and the need to get into some form of routine or daily habit that doesn’t overwhelm me. A colleague does a behind-the-scenes tour of a client site using Microsoft Teams as the channel by which we watch where he is going through the building and pointing out various areas and my mind gets racing with possibilities of doing this as a “news show”. It’s what I see on Snapchat with some people showing and sharing their day and their workplaces to others. Places like GE, Cisco and NASA actively encourage their staff to do this (well, with Marketing input and assistance of course)…
Tuesday 17 July 2018
Today I share how I’m learning Skype for Business in a formal sense. I did a course I found on YouTube and read all the Microsoft references (gazillion of them) and also created a rough outline of what I could share when the time comes for me to coach in this training. I also talk about how I’m learning OneNote.
Friday 20 July 2018
Enough of work. I’m out at the Bendigo National Wool and Sheep Show today and it’s a hoot!
Saturday 21 July 2018
Today I share what my friend and I got up to in Castlemaine. We had an opportunity to stay with her friends on their property in a delightful, remote town. Her friends also had visitors staying with them so that night was all about rollicking laughter, great meal at the local pub, Scottish whiskey and lots of warry spinning. All of them were yachties, who had circumnavigated the world and who had all sorts of wonderful sailing adventures. I was so impressed with our host who had also written 17 books in his life and as a thank you for hosting us that weekend, I offered to conduct an interview and create a video for him that he can use in his bookselling promotions. If you want to learn more about his sails then check out his blog post ScotCruising.
Monday 23 July 2018
Today I share in detail, how I do my workforce analysis (performance consulting approach) using the HPT approach which has been around for many years. (I guess you can call it the original design thinking).
Tuesday 24 July 2018
I’m off meeting clients today through job shadowing my boss to meetings in Melbourne. He was also carrying a HoloLens in his bag so I got to try this out for the first time in my life!
Wednesday 25 July 2018
Today I talk about a project I’m working on which is to build out a community site for our company. Doing something like this can be a full-time job simply because of the time it takes to curate, create, collate, design, develop, upload content on a site and then to continually maintain it over the year to ensure that it is always current and relevant. Similarly, if you want to build a community there, you need to make sure you have constant updates of new and fresh content that cannot be found elsewhere on the internet so that members feel that they are getting value for money as well as being directly connected with the community organisers. We have so much content available to upload so my realisation is that it needs to be unpacked and chunked into “microcontent” pieces delivered across a variety of ways such as documents, audio, slides, PDFs, guidebooks and so much more. I’m trying to grapple with doing this and client work and fit it within 3 days however, all I can do is work on what I can and seek assistance when I needed.
Friday 27 July 2018
Today I share a potential new consulting opportunity to assist in the development of an industry engagement model that will support scientists and researchers to show and share their work openly and publicly on social media for the purposes of identifying connections and areas of mutual collaboration and business development with industry leaders. I also talk about how I’m preparing for my presentation on “How to Share and Promote Your Business and Industry Through Visual Story Telling” at the International Association of Business Communicators Asia Pacific Conference next month.
Sunday 29 July 2018
Today I spend the day editing Iain White’s interview on video – he’s the sailor who circumnavigated the world on his yacht. I’m in awe of his adventures.
Tuesday 31 July 2018
Today I attended a client meeting to pitch our services and helpfully hoped them out with their questions around their fears of their employees using the enterprise social networks. One thing this job has taught me is to never assume your clients and their employees understand the value and benefits of the modern workplace and how to use enterprise social networks.
That’s it for July – a full month but August is even bigger…
This blog post by Helen Blunden was written in Melbourne, Australia and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
