Well, we have almost come to the end of our first course and my initial thoughts are that it went by so fast. Time Management was one of the biggest things that I think I need to learn as I move forward with this two year program. Keeping track of everyone’s comments and where in which they were posted was a little overwhelming.

 How do I think I did?

Well, I created a Feedly account to try and stay on top of student posts on their blogs but found this application not very intuitive when used on my smartphone but better on my tablet and the computer for synthesizing the information in one spot for me. Though, I still found it hard to keep up with comments and post to other student blogs as time was a large constraint. I did manage to respond to those who commented on my blog and comment on other student blogs as I could, especially between the readings of the larger articles and books, I found it challenging to keep up.

Did I stick to my plan?  

Well, I did add some of my fellow students to various applications, used Google Docs when appropriate and met with my teammates using a variety of tools that I was not necessarily familiar with before. I also taught a few new things to my teammates that they were not aware of previously. I updated my Twitter account and made some posts with some relevant articles in relation to the course. I updated my LinkedIn but I still have quite a bit of work to do there. I tried to participate as much as I could in the comments among student posts, but did feel the crunch over the last few weeks with lots of reading and assignments due. I believe all in all I did stick to my plan since I did try new applications that I was not familiar with previously and I did “dust” off my twitter account and start using that to post information regarding articles that may pose an interest to my fellow students. All in all, I think I did stick to my plan.

Strategies that were successful

Some strategies that I found successful, were to complete the readings ahead of time.  I like to cross things off of a list before beginning a new task. I found reading the content first and getting that out of the way was helpful for me. Another strategy was time management. Keeping deadlines up to date and putting things in the calendar somewhat prepared me for the activities and assignments due, while keeping an eye on what was happening in social media.

What needs work?

I still feel I need some work in this area and feel that I can be easily swayed by other outside articles and I feel that my reading can sometimes carry me off topic. I have a tendency to “over-think” things and sometimes make it harder on myself. The work-school-life balance is pretty difficult to maintain and I do feel I need work in that area too, in order to continue to cultivate my digital presence.

What did I learn?

It is hard to keep up! I will definitely need to keep working at this as I continue to update the content on my blog, post more things on Twitter and finally overhaul my LinkedIn account. I think too, deciding what to post is also critical as it is important to not just post for posting sake but to hopefully get a conversation going with other students and staff perhaps. All in all, I think I was a bit naive in the beginning thinking that it would be easy just to make some updates and post information all the time. Life takes over! Time Management is going to be  extremely important as I continue down this Master’s journey over the next two years.

Moving Forward 

If I were to update my plan, I think I would need to specifically create a schedule for when I would work on my digital presence plan. This way I would carve out the time in my schedule to do that. I could add this in to the course schedule, maybe one post a week and if that was too much, perhaps move to one post every two weeks. This would lay out the ground work to ensure I was still present online and working towards cultivating more of my digital presence. Moving forward, I think I will be working it into the actual schedule of the course since 9 weeks flies by so fast when you are trying to provide a balance between work-school and life.

 

https://recordings.join.me/B61Pfvr2ZkCFkMGyN1SGcw