Blog Every Day Challenge: Inform

Introduction

For the first two days of this challenge, I have been posting the same blog post to both my professional blog (this one) and my content creation blog (not this one). However, I have decided to challenge myself even further and start to separate the two!

In this blog, I want to relate the daily themes to areas that I teach, have a passion for, and research. The more personal posts will be on my content creation site. So from now on, more focused posts here! Stop that cheering and let’s get on!

Read more
Blog Every Day Challenge: Inform
Blog every day Challenge: Day 2: Chance
Blog every day in March: Routine
Tackling the Technology

Adding the ‘ed’

I’m not sure if this is actually allowed in the challenge but I am going to subtle change the word for today’s blog. Rather than focusing on just ‘inform’ I want to add the ‘ed’ suffix to make the word -informed.

This might, at first, seem like a small change (or cheating!) but I wanted to focus on the use of technology and this can be used effectively to keep us informed of what is going on across the world in our chosen fields and disciplines.

I’m going to try and make these ideas and suggestions generic, so they should be applicable to any area you are interested in from philosophy to films

Social Media

Contrary to what many people might believe or disseminate, social media is not the bane of our lives. It is not even a bad place. Yes, it starts to blur the boundaries between our personal and professional views and opinions and it might even make us more accessible throughout the day. But really these are all things which we have control over and which we can act on without any detrimental impact to our workload.

Social media is a place where there is a wealth of information, people, and opinions. These are being shared constantly through both the day and night. This is one of the positives of platforms such as Twitter. It has no international borders or time zones. You can engage with it asynchronously or synchronously and still gain a huge benefit from its content. But as well as keeping you informed it also provides you with a place to engage and develop a variety of skills.

The pure diversity of the content of these social media platforms means that they are a place where we need to utilise important skills such as criticality, problem-solving, and reasoning. The platforms can keep us informed with up-to-date information and opinions but we need to engage with these and decide which are real or false, which are worth exploring further or abandoning. 

So check out your favourite authors or writers, check for businesses and companies who you are interested in, and follow hashtags that might be used for tweet chats or Instagram posts and, in doing so, you will definitely expand the range of sources that keep you informed.

Email Subscriptions

I read a lot throughout the week. This could be anything from emails to academic journals. I really enjoy reading and taking notes on the content of the latter but find that it is not the actual reading and note taking which takes the time, but the location of what I might be interested in. This is where email subscriptions or emailing lists come in.

These have come a long way over the past years. Many see these as spam, but again they are emails that you have complete control over. Not only is it your choice to initially subscribe to the list, but you can also unsubscribe at any time you want or need to. All these emails now have to have an unsubscribe option at the bottom of the email – just scroll down to find it.

I use these so much, that when I am introduced to a new journal or website, the first thing I am looking for is the email sub button! Once I have signed up for this, then the content is ferried to my inbox every day, week, or month and I have a quick scan through it and decide what I need to engage with and what I do not. So easy! And, I bet you saw this coming, it keeps me informed!

Why not have a go at one and see how it goes? You can always unsubscribe later but definitely, see whether or not it supports you.

Facebook


Twitter


Youtube


Instagram

Conclusion

I hope these are two strategies that you might consider using in order to keep informed of the current advances and innovations within your discipline. Although I specifically mentioned Twitter as a social media platform remember that there are others such as Instagram and Facebook. Even Pinterest and Wakelet are being used more and more to curate information together.

As always, if you have any questions or comments then please do add them below this blog post.

No idea what I will be writing about tomorrow but I now have a category menu option on the navigation bar so you can locate all my wafflings for this challenge with one click!

Catch you tomorrow!