Here are this month’s snap stories of personal learning for August 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.
Wednesday 1 August 2018
Today my pop up green screen arrives and I do an unboxing and share some ideas of how I’m going to use it.
Friday 3 August 2018
Feeling a tad under the weather, we head of to Canberra. In this video, I talk about the new initiative called the Misfits of Learning where a few of my Learning and Development peers have created an IGTV channel of the same name where we talk about personal learning in a new and fun way. I share my Instagram video wearing my striped shirt and red beret and talk about how my father, an artist, hacks his equipment to create his own pencil shading tools for sketches. I incorporate this into my Instagram video.
Monday 6 August 2018
Today I share how I’m preparing my Snapchat Presentation for the International Association of Business Communications presentation and talk about how to include a bit of your own personality in your LinkedIn profile because I stumble upon someone who had himself wrestling a bear (pretend of course) in their LinkedIn profile. I also talk about how I do some filming for CNT News.
Tuesday 7 August 2018
It’s a co-working day with a colleague at the NAB Village as we prepare on how to provide coaching and training on Skype for Business for a client. I also talk about how virtual working feels more productive than being in an office. I feel an 8 hour day is more like double that with the amount of actual work being completed.
Wednesday 8 August 2018
Today I’m onsite at a client’s all day and we run Skype for Business workshops. I have a massive realisation that we are dealing with people who need support to build digital literacy skills because what I know is not what others know – and not to assume that they are on the same level as you are. I have found that I need to really simplify my approach to cater for the many people who really don’t understand how to use the tools they have at their fingertips at work because they spend most of their time in email – and maybe dabble in Word or a Powerpoint slide. I am feeling my ego bruised somewhat as I come to realise that my products and services at Activate Learning Solutions failed to solve the actual problem – digital literacy – because I spent my time and energy focusing on the wrong clients who didn’t realise that this was a problem in their own organisation.
I was barking up the wrong tree from the start because I made my services too complex. People don’t understand the “how” of learning – they just want some quick, instant tips, techniques and strategies to make their work life easier. Find what they need to do quickly with the least amount of clicks; and with as little thinking or behaviour change as possible. Massive realisation that L&D make things too complex – and I was part of the problem.
Thursday 9 August 2018
Surface Hub training and some more reflections of my onsite work with Skype for Business coaching with this client.
Tuesday 14 August 2018
Today I talk about some resources I’m creating on how to Create a Positioning Statement for O365 for clients. We have some clients who need some support to guide and influence their organisations to consider O365 but they may have difficulty positioning it with their senior leaders. It came about from a discussion with a client who asked for support in this. He also talked about how his organisation had created their cybersecurity e-learning into a campaign with no input by Learning and Development. Instead they used a provider called Phriendly Phishing which uses an email campaign where phishing emails get sent to their employees. Whoever opens these emails, they get data that helps provide custom support and training to that person to recognise the signs of phishing emails. Similarly, the company gets data to understand where the gaps are.
Wednesday 15 August 2018
Today we had a power outage and I had to go to the library to work. I talk about a new podcast called MetaLearn that is a great listen as well as explore how I’m using Microsoft Forms (Survey Monkey equivalent).
Friday 17 August 2018
Today I’m part of an experiment where a colleague is demonstrating live events in MS Teams. I love MS Teams. It’s one of the best Microsoft products I’ve seen and used. I also love the idea that our company has access to all the Microsoft products that we can dabble and experiment with. I’m like a kid in a candy store and realise that if IT turns on most functions in organisations, people would have ALL the learning needs at their fingertips, would be able to network across their organisation, collaborate on projects, share their knowledge, create video content and much more – all without the need of any outside applications. And, the organisation would have some fantastic analytics.
Tuesday 21 August 2018
I do a tour of Southbank today as I head over to a client and then participate in an excellent meeting with senior leaders across an organisation. Privy to some dialogue between senior leaders as to where their company is going and talk on modern workplace digital transformation.
Wednesday 22 August 2018
Talk about my 16:8 fast and a detailed run through of how I use MS Teams to do my client work and we work with my colleagues on client work.
Thursday 23 August 2018
Today is the day I talk about the wonderful story of the wreck and the new James Squire Beer that I rushed to the bottle shop to get. Beer that our first settlers drunk has been remade for a limited time so we get to taste the beer they tasted.
Monday 27 August 2018
Today I lament about why we have such an issue putting our creative projects on LinkedIn.
Tuesday 28 August 2018
I didn’t get up to much. I turned out that I didn’t need to go to a clients today despite a freezing cold start to the day. I quickly talk about how I’m working with three screens and there’s notifications pinging everywhere!
Friday 21 August 2018
I talk about how I use Facebook Memories to recall what I did up to 9 and 10 years ago when I first got onto Facebook (imagine the data they have on me!). I talk about the IABC presentation in detail and then I visit my good friend Daniel who is a rheumatologist to catch up with a coffee; I head into Southbank for a Microsoft meetup that didn’t happen and then head to VidCon to register!
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.
