I was doing so well – blogging at least once a month seemed like a reasonable and achievable goal, and I just about met that target for several years. Yes, I complemented blog posts with more frequent short comments and re-posts of newsworthy articles in Linked-In and Twitter. I have my paper-li daily round up of carefully chosen follows published in Twitter and some favourited lists in Slideshare, and many tagged articles in delicious, all public and sharable. But even when very busy I still made the monthly minimum one blog post for several years. 2012 got a bit patchy, and then radio silence in Spring & Summer, 2013. So what happened? Busy with multiple commitments, of course. But I think there was more to it than that. I continued to struggle with ongoing dilemmas: how long should a post be? How much value add and insight can I provide? And how broad, multi-topic vs. deeper and single topic to make a post?
I’m not short of topics to write on, but somehow topics overlapped and draft posts seemed to not do justice to what I was thinking.
Now, why re-start? I am often reminded of the value of blogging as I read many posts, most days, from others. The value is not only in the sharing, but in the reflection and articulation of experience. Furthermore, it is clear that posts do not need to be perfect or complete. Indeed, a staged, or multi-post coverage of a topic is fine. Each post should be worth reading independent of other posts, but chunking, or bite-size coverage is useful, productive, and possibly more manageable than the more ambitious complete topic coverage. Finally, I realized that I missed the discipline of this reflective practice. I was still doing this myself, mentally, but the writing and public sharing practice forces a completion of the thought process that is sometimes missed in the partial mental reflections.
So, what have I been working on in the last 6 months and more?
- Flexible and flipped teaching approaches – learning by doing. I have continued to become more ambitious and experimental in flexible teaching and learning approaches. This has been given additional fuel and energy by the UBC Flexible Learning initiative, where I am actively involved.
- Entrepreneurship – applied – broadening access, improving quality. I have been working very closely with e@ubc to build out the structure and content of programming using Steve Blank’s Lean Launch Pad (LLP) methodology. We have run several successful test LLP Accelerator Programs and will formalize a calendar for these and application process to get involved. I have been helping lead the build out of curriculum for the MBA Innovation and Entrepreneurship Track, with exciting new courses starting Fall 2013, in Growing & Exiting a Venture, and Intra-preneurship (Corporate Innovation.) I have also championed the creation of a new undergraduate entry level course, “e101” (comm486A), available to any undergraduate student at UBC who has second year standing or higher. Three sections will run this year, and students from 15 different faculties have signed up – exciting.
- Digital marketing and social media: I continue to re-invent my approach to helping equip students will skills in these fast-changing topics. This Fall, students in my comm464 eMarketing class will be enrolled in Hootsuite’s online learning suite, and have access to Hootsuite Pro. This will be embedded into the overall curriculum. And, in January 2014, I will once again partner up with the School of Journalism in a combined SoJ/Comm course in Advanced Social Media skills, with a focus on content curation and creation.
I will write separate posts in more detail on each of these themes in the coming weeks and months.
FINALLY…..
Lessons Learned
(Borrowed as a blogging format from Steve Blank. Sure, many of us have had “action minutes” or “takeaways” as a long-standing write-up from meetings and interactions. But the discipline of summarizing “lessons learned” from the story or narrative and examples in any blog post is something that I have found makes Steve’s posts focused and really valuable. I’m aiming to emulate this format for my chosen blog topics.)
- Content is increasingly good and free: curation not creation is key.
- Navigation, interpretation, coaching and cheer-leading are the areas where I can add most value for students, and this is my “teaching and learning” philosophy.
- “Bite size” is good for blogging.
- Walk in the shoes (and get into the minds) of your customer – be they students or consumers or organizational customers
- Hypothesis, experiment, interpret à validate, pivot, kill à hypothesis v2, and iterate. It works for start-up ventures, and any activity where one wants to innovate and improve.
Have a great end of Summer and start to Fall – whatever you are doing. And reflect and renew your practice to try to improve and reach your goals.
