Hi friends,
Sorry for missing last week Weekly Learning... I am still struggling with being consistent with my writing and publishing cadence. I will try to be better 😭
Welcome to the past week learning 🙌 ❤️
You will find:
Work Updates
Self Updates
Interesting Read
Work Updates 👩🍳
I. A new course is launched!
We recently launched a new course on learning science - on to a new venture to build a learning community around self learning and lifelong learning.
We will cover topics such as learning philosophies, motivational theories, knowledge types, schema theory, learning through experience, Edtech products in learning. Throughout the course, everyone will be working on a personal learning diary over 30 days where we will reflect on our existing beliefs and behaviors in learning and create plan to observe and understand our new learning behaviors. After 30 days, we can see the transformations in how we approach and think about learning.
As usual, I am working with the instructor and my team to think about content, ways to apply the content, and community experience. Pretty excited about it 🙌
II. Wrapped up our knowledge management course
One of my biggest learning through building this course is that I shouldn't expect the same community engagement and dynamics from one course to another.
We were able to create such a vibrant and dynamic learning community at Writing On The Net so I had a lot of pressure that the Knowledge Management course also needs to match that. Many times, I don't think I was thinking from first principles to really understand the problems each student has and how they are learning and progressing in the course. I was focusing too much on community engagement, which often comes next after we can clearly define the problem, the learning outcome, and the target learner.
And because I cared too much about community engagement overall and compared the KM course to WOTN course, I was not as attentive towards every student's experience as I should have. I wasn't practicing 'do things that don't scale' mentality when executing the course.
I received these two comments from our two lovely students that really touched me. They reminded me that the more important thing to worry about at the early stage of a course is checking in with students and understanding how they are feeling about the course.
Community is often complex and needs time to emerge. And most importantly, I cannot impose the same method to measure success of one community to another.
Many thanks to our lovely customers to believe in us ❤️
III. Hiring and talent development
I want to learn more about hiring and retaining talent. Any recommendations on sources I should consume?
Self Updates 💆♀️
I. Identity wrapped around work
As I was working on my design life workshop, I realized how much of my identity is wrapped around work. I feel lucky and grateful that I am doing work that I care about. But at the same time, I constantly reflect and ask myself why I am doing the work that I am doing or what I want with my work, my life. Sometimes these questions can be quite tiring. There are days that I am not doing very well in work or I feel uninspired and I let those feelings consume me. It's so unhealthy to feel happy only when work is going well. I think this is partly unlearning that work is not everything, it's also partly having the emotional maturity to compartmentalize feelings about work and feelings about life.
The other week, I went to a female circle in Saigon. Everyone there is either an entrepreneur currently or used to be one. I came into the circle with a lot of expectations to learn about their journey of building companies and I was very excited. But turns out, we began with a Life Graph exercise where we shared our life journeys with each other, all the high and low points of our lives so far. Almost no one talked extensively about their work.
The workshop wasn't what I expected, but in a good way. It humbles me as a founder/entrepreneur/business owner, an identity that I wrap around myself coming into the workshop. It helps remind me that at the end of the day, I am a normal human who goes through ups and downs just like everyone else.
In my mid 20s, work is important and will continue to be important for me. I guess instead of making the goal to find the perfect work or path because I would never find it, how about I make the goal to add more joy in the things that I am doing every day?
II. Lacking self belief continues!
A few weeks ago I wrote “Lack of self belief” and friends, these feelings of not believing in myself or doubting myself keep coming back to me. But these days, I am more patient with these feelings. I observe and recognize them and I don’t force myself to solve anything right away. I know that better days will come eventually. And it really helps!
Interesting Read 💡
As I was building the new course, I found a newsletter called Commoncog which has a lot of interesting articles on learning techniques in the real world. If you are interested in how to self learn better as practitioners/working professionals, you should give it a read ❤️
I am honestly feeling a bit uninspired at the moment so I would love recommendations on things to read/see that you find interesting and give you joy.
Love you friends,
Do Fuong.