Gratitude Blog
I wrote two short blog entries regarding my PLN development progress (The Journey Begins! and Slow and Steady Wins the Race?!). These had very minimal views (7-14 views only) and one of the blogs received a single like. These were created in the very early days of developing my professional digital identity and the weak response is due to the minimal number of followers I had at this stage, as well as my initial reluctance to ‘put myself out there’.
Around mid-way through my PLN development journey, I wrote a blog based on my research into the effects of gratitude called "Gratitude and the Pursuit of Happiness". I really enjoyed the process of researching and writing this blog – it was in itself a gratifying and cathartic experience, which is essential for my connected learning experience (Richardson & Mancabelli, 2011). I posted across all social media platforms and tried to use strategic hashtags (Cook et al., 2016) to incorporate a range of Positive Education and Positive Psychology branches. The response was reasonable with a modest number of likes and several shares and re-tweets. I also received a few comments on the blog itself (seen at the bottom of this page), which was immensely pleasing.
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The greatest impact from this post came after I had noticed that one Twitter user, who had begun to follow me, appeared to be an Australian Positive Education teacher who made insightful and motivational comments on my posts. In an act of bravery, I decided to contact her via DM. She responded favourably and directed me to another leader in the Positive Education world. We have continued to communicate on Positive Education matters since. The contacts I had made in the online world were starting to merge with offline contacts, which was an incredibly exciting and important development.
DM conversation via Twitter (used with approval)
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Click on image to enlarge.