Here are this month’s snap stories of personal learning for October 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.
Monday 1 October 2018
Today my video got photobombed (video bombed) by our cat Pud. He seems to follow me around everywhere and many times I simply don’t realise he’s there. I also talk briefly about reading the Swoop Analytics Benchmark report on enterprise social networks. I went through it with a fine tooth comb because there was a lot of good information within it that is applicable to many different parts of any organisation on how their people collaborate.
Friday 5 October 2018
I’m an avid lover of art and visiting galleries – even though I may not understand it. Today, I decided to get out of the house and visit the Ian Potter National Gallery of Victoria and see the modern art on display and be challenged a bit. I need to do things that get my brain thinking differently even though it feels foreign and most of the time, I don’t even pretend to understand it.
Sunday 7 October 2018
The cleaning bug overcame me and I did a massive clean up of my home office stumbling upon some old photos and memorabilia of my days as a Divisional Officer at the Australian Defence Force Academy. Not one of the highlights of my career (it was pretty hard going) but it was definitely a personal and professional development experience working (and moulding) young officer cadets and Navy Midshipmen. Even in the military, I was a bit of dill but I played the game. In life, you just need to play the game but this job ended up being most enlightening for me and the importance of self and team leadership. I did it in the form of a slide show this time around.
Monday 8 October 2018
In this video I reflect more about my work and how my typical day looks like. By now, I’m having realisations that there is so much I could have done and explored when I was in Learning and Development that made me realise why I was constantly coming up with obstacles from my peers and with business.
It’s safe to note that these reflections change daily of course – many of these are “a ha” moments that make me sit up and take note.
I’m definitely not bitter and twisted about it but if anything, the sheer simplicity of the problem I had in front of me wasn’t realised and I made these problems huge in my head.
Obviously, I haven’t learned my lesson – I should have taken my own advice from Sunday 7 October above with “play the game” but then there’s another part of me that is screaming inside, “why play games?” Or am I just idealistic?
Any work is so much better when you have trust, openness, integrity and honesty; also admit to failures. I put up my hand to say, that I’ve failed heaps but would also like to assume that by thinking, sharing and then coming up with alternative future courses of action means they won’t be repeated in future. I like to work with people and teams of people who share this work ethic but also realise that with our own failings there are others who have strength and skill in this area to support us.
Tuesday 9 October 2018
In this video I reflect on the work I did as an independent consultant and the (mainly) self-taught skills of website development (WordPress), video creation, content marketing and community development and how all these help me in my current role which is a lovely combination of everything including consulting, training, coaching and content development so I’m doing everything that I love and enjoy – with a MASSIVE amount of personal learning of Microsoft products which I LOVE to do and take great delight in delving into. Much of this I haven’t shared openly because well, for no reason, other than just taking this as my own personal learning journey. Sometimes it’s just nice not to share what you’re doing; or have people comment on it.
Thursday 11 October to Sunday 14 October 2018
I took four days off and travelled to the Grampians for a short break with my parents so the videos I created there were all personal ones showing the general bush landscape. You can see the individual days in my Personal Playlist on my YouTube channel or just watch the general one I created here to music and stuff…
Monday 15 October 2018
In this video, I share how I’m learning Win10 and also doing some screencasts about it in Camtasia.
Friday 19 October 2018
Today I did some filming for CNT News, a sideline funny show that I’m part of where I play Shazza Breaknews, Foreign Correspondent. I was asked to do a small video of me playing the ukulele and I hadn’t picked up this instrument in two years so needless to say I was rusty. I then went into the study to focus on LinkedIn Learning and talked about their partnership with Microsoft. I still think that curation is a critical skill but I’m not finding any particular products of Microsoft that do this really well and in depth. Delve stops short slightly.
So I wrote a blog post about it called Don’t Kill Off Delve and talked about it here. I think workers should have collections of content that they keep (and can include their own value by sharing their ideas and thoughts about them) and they can share theses curated resources. Currently they can’t do this with work related stuff – seems to be a missing piece of a critical skill that workers need to make sense of the information that comes to them.
Tuesday 23 October 2018
Today I’m at a client site and I share what it is I’m doing supporting and coaching that organisation with their Win10 roll out. I enjoyed this piece of work because I learned as much as I could about Win10 and was happy to share my knowledge and learning to people. I also love that this organisation values face-to-face and a personal approach to learning. During my days, I like to “walk the floor” and chat to people about how they’re working and what they’re working on. This simple approach has made me appreciate that at times, I offered solutions that were far too sophisticated when people really want to get work done as efficiently and quickly as possible. Watching them at their work, I see the use cases for how to explain the tools they have on hand and how to use them better for their particular purposes. As it’s a small organisation, I think this approach works. Besides, it gets people talking and sharing ideas at their workplace – this is social learning – about conversations and “a ha” moments worked into your day.
Friday 26 October 2018
Today I went into town for a LinkedIn Meetup (linkup?) so it was good to have a chat with some LinkedIn buddies and then I thought, while I’m there, I hadn’t been to the Immigration Museum but it was pointless. Guess who forgot her credit cards, cash and her phone battery was dwindling. So I went home. All I learned today was to be better prepared when leaving the house.
Saturday 27 October 2018
It helps to have friends who work for book publishers so I was told of a massive warehouse sale in the ‘burbs of Melbourne and I headed down there early to fight the crowds and ended up buying heaps of books for bargain prices.
Sunday 29 October 2018
Today I share some reviews of a couple of books I’m reading called Exit West – a love story between a couple of refugees and also Slaughter House 5 which left me depressed. And so it goes.
Tuesday 30 October 2018
Today I share the saga of trying to close down Third Place on Meetup because I had transferred it over to a Facebook Group. I wrote about it in the recent blog post Third Place is Now On Facebook. Finally after a lot of to and fro, I was able to finally close this account and get my money refunded. Suffice to say that Third Place is still current and relevant but not sitting on the Meetup platform.
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.
