Tag: Scanner Central

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Life(style)

Screw Work, Let’s Play by @johnsw

I’m chuffed to say that I’m ahead of the game on this book… it’s not yet out, although I’m looking forward to receiving my signed copy as soon as it’s available!

How did I meet John?

In 2007, having taken voluntary redundancy from the University of Manchester, I was trying to work out where next, and came across one of Barbara Sher’s books, which I found very revolutionary! I started to hunt around for something similar in the UK, and came across Scanner Central, run by John Williams, who had been on one of Barbara’s retreats (see a recent blog entry as to how he has made his ‘career path’, or should we say career hop, skip & jump, so successful). To be honest, I’m not sure whether I braved a Scanner’s Night ‘cold’, or whether I had already been chatting to @johnsw on Twitter… ah look, a previous blog entry tells me that it was the pull of a talk on social media that pulled me up to London! I have since been to several events (even made it onto the video here), and look forward to more (and wish I’d blogged about ALL the events I’ve been to..), but here’s one more from the event re: “getting yourself on TV“.

Share photos on twitter with TwitpicScrew Work, Let’s Play

Since taking that redundancy, I’ve been ‘playing’ with various ideas, and in training as a life coach, realised how much I wanted to recapture that sense of ‘fun’ in whatever work I did, re-injecting life with colour. I have been experimenting with various things to see where I want to take it next, and so far have discovered that I love teaching (especially when I can inspire others to think differently) – especially groups, although I enjoy one-to-one mentoring also, that I can’t stand a 9-5, that I want to work with many different people, on many different projects (all informing each other in sometimes interesting and surprising ways), and that I am a real ‘Digital Resident’ (but that I very much want to find ways to ensure that I am in charge, rather than the digital life taking over!) – really enjoying developing community and communication (hence my PhD, and why I enjoyed being a tour leader so much). For years, as I’ve played around in the online world, I have produced material that others have found helpful, so in April  2009, I decided to rethink my ‘Web Consultancy’ ‘Mydesigna’, and focus it more towards social media (I’m more into structure, content and community, rather than programming or design – although I know what looks good!), creating  http://digital-fingerprint.co.uk/.

Screw Work, Let’s Play

In January 2010, John offered a few places on a 10 week teleseminar course (plus reduced entry to Scanner’s Night), which, despite an already over-heavy workload (which I want less of in the future… hence why I seized the opportunity), I decided to seize. I am looking forward to 5 weeks time, when teaching/marking comes to an end, and I can start to find some space to go back over the material, and consider where I want to develop some more thinking! The first activity we undertook was to determine our wealth dynamics profile (included as part of the course) – apparently I’m a “star”. I’m always fascinated by any kind of personality profiling (and would like to train in administering some!), whilst also determining what we were going to focus upon on this particular course – which I decided would be developing Digital Fingerprint. I plan to be back in the summer with more illustration of how I have developed since this course, but for now, it’s back to that pile of marking!! I’ll let you disappear off to read the blog for more, and order the book (recommended in today’s Sunday Times as one of the six hottest self-help books around – see image above)!

Categories
Digital

San Sharma @ Scanner Central

Last night I went to my first Scanner Central event. I’ve been meaning to go for quite some time… although as I said to John Williams when he asked me how I’d heard of them, I can’t remember any more, but it was something to do with reading Barbara Sher ‘s book and then finding that John had been on one of her holidays abroad, and had since set up something in London! It’s a bit of a trek from Winchester (about 1.5 hours each way), so I may not be able to go every month, but it’s great to meet other people who change interests so often, and John wants to encourage people to work together to get some of those ideas into production, rather than giving up as soon as you’re bored with it! I guess I’m more of a longer-term scanner, as I DO have lots of short-term interests, but also have some long term ones, centred around learning, academia, learning, contemporary contemporary Christianity, and wartime posters!

San Sharma gave a really interesting talk (apparently only his second time of public speaking: wouldn’t have known if he hadn’t said!), most of which was familiar to me, but it’s always great to see that I’m on the same wavelength as others, and there’s always a couple of things you come across that you go “ah ha” to! Most of the tools are listed from San’s presentation (see below), but gave some interesting context for social media also!
  • Any business not in social media is not likely to survive for long in the modern world.
  • Social media allows you to express different parts of yourself, as you talk you find a theme/style that you like and others who like it. So you connect with others with whom you have things in common.
  • Social media – offers accessible publishing tools for everybody, for many to many dialogues.
  • It has changed the fundamental nature of news media, from institutions to the media, the masses decide what’s hot (see how quickly the news about Michael Jackson’s death got out)
  • It’s now about how good you are, not who you know, or who you work for.
  • Twitter is rather like a city, where you overhear random conversations. A lot of the conversation is random, but this is similar to real-life where chit-chat hold human groups together. No one cares what you had for breakfast except you, but you’ll tell others anyway (we’re talking offline, as much as online!)
  • Social media is just another tool, you can write a novel with a biro, typewriter, computer, blog… all different tools, although changes the writing/reading experience somewhat.
  • Social media offers an opportunity to build meaningful relationships, and follow industry news (whether you’re pulling it down or pushing it up)
  • Twitter: Should it change it’s question from “What are you doing?” to change the kind of responses that it gets?!
  • Mass media offers a mass experience for events, for example, for the final of the Apprentice, felt a bit like was watching it with the rest of the nation in the front room, following Twitter feeds!
More Information:
  • See San Sharma’s presentation here (6MB, PDF) (picture)
  • I have been using Vistaprint, but love the Minicards that Moo uses (San does some work for Moo, and a number of Scanners had the cards)
  • Handy tools: Knowem; DandyID
Other Presentations
Categories
Digital

Scanner? For Sure!


I love this from Barbara Sher: “you wouldn’t ask a bird to pull a plough. It’s not cos it’s an inferior bird, a naughty bird or a lazy bird. It’s just cos it does other stuff and there are animals who do that… it’s their thing, they know how to pull a plough. And there are people who do the things you don’t like to do, and they like to do them, and they’ll do them better than you’ll ever do them on your best day because they get a kick out of it!”

Barbara Sher
First came across Barbara Sher in 2007, when I was trying to decide what I SHOULD do “for the rest of my life”, not sure that’s for me, and coming to terms with the fact that I can do many things, and that my passion for doing them means that I’ll do them well, but there reaches a point where I’m done! I have noted, however, that my interests circulate around learning/research, teaching/academia (post-compulsory), communication, community creation (online, including new media or offline) and contemporary Christianity!
Scanners Night, 8th July
Looking forward to going to a Scanner’s Night in London next Wednesday (organised by John Williams), with San Sharma, a Social Media Consultant.