Developing Skills 2 Flashcards
What is your digital footprint?
- Social media activity
- Browsing history
- Online subscriptions
- Photo galleries
- Videos uploaded
- Personal websites/blogs
- e.g. anything on the internet with your name (or image) on it
- Your digital footprint is a record or trail left by everything you do online
Why does your digital footprint matter?
- What goes online, stays online (‘Never put a temporary emotion on the permanent internet’)
- The way you use social media can impact on your career/job prospects
- Potential employers use it to look up and screen applicants
How can you limit the negatives on your accounts?
- List down all your accounts, keep only the accounts you use, delete ones that you don’t use
- Use privacy settings, know the various privacy settings available on social media (but don’t over-rely on them)
- Create a second email account
- Create a Google Alert
Worst case scenario - go nuclear
- Delete social media accounts
- Unsubscribe from mailing lists
- Delete forum comments and blog posts
- Delete email accounts
How do you maintain a professional profile?
- Keep your profile up to date
- Don’t overshare
- Consider how your personal views and comments posted online will be read by others
- Think about who is shaping your digital footprint (is it you or your friends?)
Who created the THINK model?
Melissa Pilakowski (2015)
Explain the THINK model (Melissa Pilakowski, 2015)
T - is it True?
H - is it Helpful?
I - is it Inspiring?
N - is it Necessary?
K - is it Kind?
Can having no online identity be detrimental?
Yes!
- Social media skills are valued by employers, so it’s good to demonstrate that you have them
- You can use social media to promote your skills, achievements, experience and interests
- Showcase good communication skills, creativity, being a well-rounded person, examples of anything related to your desired profession
How do you develop a positive digital footprint?
- Create a website in your own name so that your site shows up high in search engines for queries of your name
- Start a blog and create content, don’t just blog about anything, have a focus and develop an expertise relevant to your industry
- Establish your credibility on the topics related to the job you are actively pursuing, participate in online forums and communities that matter most
How can you keep it positive?
- Share your interests, stimulate discussion, learn and share
- Share successes and achievements, give appreciation and thanks where due
- Self-control, remain authentic, avoid ranting, shunning or being rude
- Make timely contributions, monitor conversations (but don’t overshare!)
How should you use your social media profiles?
- Commit to using your social media profiles from the mindset of a job seeker
- Be active on Twitter
- Optimise your LinkedIn profile
- Use Facebook wisely
- Instagram can help
- YouTube and Pinterest
What professional guidelines should you be aware of?
- The various professional bodies all publish guidelines on what they expect from their members with regard to the use of social media
- You should familiarise yourself with the relevant guidelines and use your social media to demonstrate an understanding of these
What are examples of the UoB social media expectations?
- Students should consider other people’s feelings
- Respect other people’s freedom of speech
- Provide feedback through appropriate channels
- Students shouldn’t include photos, images or recordings of staff or students without their permission
What are the components of a single page website?
- Modern design trend
- One page, continuous scrolling
- No distractions for user
- No decisions on where to go
- Easily adapted for mobile
- Not suitable for large amounts of complex content
What are the components of a multi page website?
- Traditional layout
- Multiple pages and sub-pages
- Menus and sub menus
- User navigates in any order
- Find what they want quickly
- Suitable for large amounts of complex content
- Hard to adapt for mobile devices
What are single pages versus multi pages best for?
Single page best for:
- Content with narrow focus
- Want users to perform a single task (buy something, sign up for something)
Multi page best for:
- Complex content
What are some reasons for why you like a site?
Why?
- Graphics
- Colour schemes
- Layout
Easy to use?
- Clear navigation?
- Find what you want easily?
- Scan read quickly?
Or just the content?
What are the important elements when it comes to brand logos?
- Site identifiable with your brand
- Brand logo on every page
- Usually top left
- Link back to home page
What are the important elements when it comes to themes?
Website tools offer themes
- Colour schemes
- Layouts
- Fonts
Switch between them
Consistent look and feel
What are the important elements when it comes to colours?
- Avoid too many colours
- Aim for good colour balance
- High colour contrast - text
- Search web for colour palettes
What are the important elements when it comes to menus?
- Important
- How visitors find what they want
- Usually at top
- Limit top level (then use sub-menus)
- Menu items - must be clear, descriptive
What are the important elements when it comes to links and links to social media?
Links
- Easily recognisable as links
- Links to external site - new tab
- Check links regularly
Links to social media
- Link to your social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter)
- Link back from these to your website
What are the important elements when it comes to footers?
Pages to include:
- About us
- Contact us
- Terms and conditions
- Privacy policy
- Support
Links in footer
What are the important elements when it comes to images?
- Add interest and focus
- High quality
- Take your own photos
- Stock photos
- Copyright
Creative Commons Zero - CC0
www.pixabay.com
www.pexels.com - Optimise images
Appropriate file size
What are the important elements when it comes to videos?
- Better to show than describe
- Keep them short and snappy
- Embed from YouTube (play on your page, most videos allow embedding)
- Upload own videos (consider storage issue)
- Don’t set to play automatically
Explain written content and content at top of home page (what percentage of web content is text?)
Written content:
- 95% of web content is text
- Accurate
- Relevant
- Concise
- Avoid jargon and tech-speak (use language your visitors will understand)
- Informal tone (as if addressing an individual, appropriate to content)
Content at top of home page:
- Consider content at top of page
- What your visitor sees first
- Good quality
- Visitor will make decision about the rest of the site
How can websites be made easy to scan read?
- Short paragraphs
- Headings and sub-headings
- Font size
- Colour
- Bullets
- Images
- White space
Explain mobile devices (what will visitors look at your site on?)
Visitors will look at your site on:
- Desktops
- Laptops
- Tablets
- Phones
Will look different on all
What is something that should be done with important information? (in terms of mobile devices)
- Ensure important information is visible on all of these (desktops, laptops, tablets, phones)
- Website tools can help with this
- May not be perfect
- Test it!
How do visitors interact with a site on a mobile device?
- Out and about
- In a hurry
- On a small screen
- Seeking answers to questions
Provide fast, accurate answers
Explain testing
- Important to test
- All aspects
- Ask others to test for you and give feedback
- Test on desktops, laptops, tablets and phones
What is accessibility?
Accessibility means that websites are designed and developed so that people with disabilities can use them
Explain screen reader software
- Specifically for those with impaired sight
- Reads contents of the page
- Page must be well structured
Explain structure - headings and sub-headings
- When you look at a webpage, you pick out the headings
- Screenreader can do the same IF headings are identified
- Format headings with Heading1 style
- Sub-headings with Heading2, then Heading3, etc. style
What are alternative texts for images?
- Short description of image
- Screenreader reads this alternate text
What are other important things for accessibility?
- High contrast for text and background colour (avoid white text on black background)
- Don’t use colour alone to get across a message
- Don’t use flickering or flashing images or text (seizures in susceptible individuals)
- Descriptive links
- Transcripts for audio/video content (YouTube sub-titles)
- Don’t set video or audio to play automatically
Explain website tools and apps (service, URL, and limitations of free version)
- Wix
www.wix.com
500MB storage
1GB bandwidth
Modified URL - www.username.wixsite.com
Adverts - Site 123
www.site123.com
500MB storage
1GB bandwidth
Modified URL - www.sitename.site123.me
Adverts - Weebly
www.weebly.com
500MB storage
Modified URL - www.sitename.weekly.com
Adverts - WordPress
www.wordpress.com
3GB storage
Modified URL - www.sitename.wordpress.com
Adverts
Explain wireframing
- Common design tool for webpages
- Visual representation of pages
- Rough sketches with pen and paper
- Show position of menus, logos, text, images, buttons and boxes
- No details such as colour or image content
- Think about what to include (search box, login box?)
Give examples of how innovation at a macro level can change the world
- Printing press allowed literacy to expand
- Lightbulb brought about social change
- Cars resulted in large scale mobility
- Penicillin changed medicine and saved lives
- The internet changed mass communication and created global cultures
Explain innovation
- Drives people to find opportunities
- Encourages personal growth
- Boosts creativity and confidence
- Flourishes education
- Increases productivity
- Crucial for workplace improvement
- Gives competitive advantage
- Determines success
- Brings communities together
- Drives economic growth
Who created the invention cycle?
Seelig (2014)
Explain the invention cycle
- Imagination - envision what doesn’t exist
- Creativity - apply imagination to address a challenge
- Innovation - apply creativity to develop unique ideas
- Entrepreneurship - apply innovation to bring ideas to fruition
Quote by Albert Einstein
“Don’t listen to the person who has the answers: listen to the person who has the questions”
Should ‘why’ questions be asked and why?
No!
- ‘Why’ can be dangerous if not used in the right way
- ‘Why’ elicits a story/explanations of why something is true; if you ask why nothing is working the way you want it to, you may create a set of bias inferences; however, if reframes and asked the right way, can be useful
Explain innovation with impact
- Viability - business model and sustainability
- Feasibility - technology and capability
- Desirability - customer need and value
Overlap of the three is innovation with impact
What are the traits of an entrepreneur? (probably don’t need to know in loads of detail)
- Self-confidence
- Passion
- Motivation
- Product knowledge
- Ability to network
- Optimism
- Vision
Goal mindset - Risk-taking
- Creativity
- Persuasiveness
- Decision-making
- Tenacity
- Money management
What are the features of an innovation mindset?
- Belief - I believe innovation is important to the organisation
- Perspective - I recognise the different roles and strengths that contribute to innovation
- Action - I use a range of different tools and techniques to make innovation happen
Explain effective time management
- Effective time management is different for all of us
- Demands, Choices, and Constraints lead to YOU
- We all have different demands and constraints on our time, and make different choices about how we manage our time
Give a summary of time wasters (probably don’t need to know in loads of detail)
- Binge watching Netflix
- Standing in a Starbucks queue before a lecture
- Studying without a clear plan
- Browsing social media
- Being part of unproductive study groups
- Reading notes over and over again
- Being part of clubs or organisations that don’t interest you
- Telling yourself, “I’ll do if after [blank]”
- Too much socialising
- Agreeing to every invite you get
- Virtual window shopping
- Participating in too many group messages
- Skipping lectures
- FaceTiming friends or family for too long
- Trying to be the perfect student
Quote about procrastination
Procrastination is the thief of time
What is good time management? (3 A’s)
- The decision-making process that structures, protects, and adjusts a person’s time to changing environmental conditions
- Three particular skills separate time management from failure:
1. Awareness - thinking realistically about your time by understanding it’s a limited resource
2. Arrangement - designing and organising your goals, plans, schedules, and tasks to effectively use time
2. Adaptation - monitoring your use of time while performing activities, including adjusting to interruptions or changing priorities
Explain awareness
- Developing awareness skills; effectiveness is different than efficiency, with effectiveness being about impact and efficiency being about doing well and promptly; both are critical; pursuing efficiency for its own sake is counter-productive
- Find your peak performance time - break your typical day into 3-4 time slots and, over the course of a week, rank-order these slots from your most to least productive (most productive is peak performance)
- Treat your time like it’s money - create a time budget that details how you spend your hours during a typical week; categorise time into fixed time (“must do’s”) and discretionary time (“want to do’s”)
- Evaluate how realistically you assess time - after finishing a project, evaluate how long you thought it would take and how long it actually took
- Take a “future time perspective” - think about how the tasks you are doing right now will help or hurt you in the future (e.g. how do today’s tasks impact next week’s tasks?)
- Avoid “sunk cost fallacy” - when you think you might be spending too much time on an activity, step back and evaluate its importance (e.g. how valuable is the outcome, who will be affected if it’s finished or not finished, etc.)
How can you improve your time management?
- Prioritise activities and obligations (it’s not enough to simply list our your tasks, to-do lists, and meetings)
- Avoid the “mere urgency effect” - urgency and importance are related by distinct concepts; urgent tasks require immediate action, whereas important tasks have more significant and long-term consequences; tasks that are both urgent and important should be done first
- Use a calendar app - record due dates for tasks and appointments, and do this immediately when they are planned or requested; label or colour-code entries (e.g. work, university, life, etc.)
- Schedule protected time - make calendar appointments with yourself to ensure uninterrupted time to dedicate to your most important projects
- Reduce underestimation errors - when forming plans, ask a neutral party for feedback about your forecasted time requirements
- Try half-sized goals - when struggling to attain a goal that seems to be too challenging, set a less difficult version of the goal
- Try “habit stacking” - tie your time management behaviours to habits you already exhibit (e.g. track daily progress every evening when you sit down to eat)
- Use short bursts of effort - when tasks seem overwhelming, put forth maximum effort for 15-30 minute intervals to help avoid procrastination
- Experiment with time-tracker or checklist apps - remember benefit must exceed cost when using these tools; gains should outweigh the time spent using the app
- Don’t be a “reminder miser” - reminders should have detailed explanations or descriptions, not one or two words that fail to describe the task’s importance, expected quality, and so forth
- Create contingency plans - think about best case/worst case scenarios when you outline possible outcomes of your plans
- Seek to reduce time wasters - create do not disturb slots and block social media sites during critical work time
Explain prioritisation and the Eisenhower/Time Management Matrix
- Urgent and Important (do it first) - you need to do this first (e.g. crises, emergencies, pressing problems, deadline-driven projects, last minute preparations)
- Not Urgent but Important (schedule it) - this is the stuff that should be second in your priorities; time should be scheduled and set aside for these tasks (e.g. preparation, planning, prevention, values clarification, capability improvement, relationship building, true recreation/relaxation)
- Urgent but Not Important (delegate it) - most us respond to time pressure rather than value; this often comes second, pushing out the “not urgent, but important” stuff (e.g. interruptions, some callers, some mail, some meetings, many pressing matters, popular activities)
- Not Urgent and Not Important (delete it) - but often fun or displacement activity, or SEP’s (somebody else’s problem) (e.g. busy work, trivial activities, some calls/emails, escape activities, time wasters)
Comment on priorities
When you say “I don’t have time”, what you’re really saying is “I have other priorities”
Explain goal setting for better time management
- SMART aims
- Being specific is critical for effective time management
Who is involved?
What do I want to accomplish?
When: Establish a time frame
Which: Identify requirements and constraints
Why: Specific reasons, purpose or benefits of accomplishing the goal
What is considered to be the ultimate time and productivity drain when not managed correctly?
Emails
Explain email management
- Organise your inbox - don’t let your inbox get overrun with old emails; read them and decide what to do with them them the first time; set up a folder system to separate reference emails from actionable ones
Next Action: Emails that contain information or attachments necessary to complete a task
Waiting For: Emails you’re waiting on for a response
Reference: Emails that don’t require a next action, but that you might want to reference later - Never let an important email be overlooked - Create an automatic reminder to follow up on “Waiting for” items by BCCing yourself (blind carbon copy - copying email to yourself) or setting rules in your inbox
- The 2 minute rule - Can the next action be completed in two minutes or less? Just do it. Whether it’s responding to an email, scheduling a meeting or another quick task, it’s not worth letting it sit on your to-do list. Get it done and move on
- Improve your subject lines - Professionally and personally, we receive countless emails each day, too many of which are lengthy, unfocused and not actionable. Avoid being part of the problem
- Don’t respond to your email on demand and don’t read every email the moment it arrives - Instead, set aside a couple of times each day to review and then answer emails. This means that you only read each email once, not the typical 2 or 3 times
- Don’t answer your email at your most productive time of day (typically the morning)
- Never use email for complex issue, video/phone/call/in-person meeting instead
Give a summary of time management - what are the 7 most important components?
- Set goals correctly
- Prioritise wisely
- Set a time limit
- Take breaks between tasks
- Organise yourself
- Remove non-essential tasks
- Plan ahead
What is translating science?
- Describes the multiple ways in which the activity and benefits of higher education and research can be shared with society
- A two-way process, involving interaction and listening, with the goal of generating mutual benefit
Explain public engagement - interactive science exhibit
Display boards:
- Information about eyewitness memory
- Created by UG students in groups
- UG practice distilling key messages
Demonstrations:
- Eyewitness memory experiment
- UG experience conducting a study with children
- Children and guardians experience how research is conducted
- Collected data from over 2,200 children (aged 4-16)
Dressing up:
- Game created by UG students to teach children about fair and unfair lineups
- Increased media coverage (parents taking photos)
Colouring/drawing:
- To occupy younger children
- Opportunity to talk to parents and guardians
Website:
- Continued engagement
- Participant recruitment (advertise online experiments)
Outcomes
Mutual benefits:
- Forged a fantastic relationship with ThinkTank Museum
- Forged links with other stakeholders, such as police officers
- Substantial media exposure for us and Birmingham Museums
- On my Twitter account alone, my tweets about the exhibit were viewed over 6,000 times
- The general public (and children) learnt about psychology research and our research topic
- Met with many potential Birmingham University students
- Helped us to develop our research programme (grants/pilot data)
- Opportunity for students to apply knowledge learnt in lectures
- Enhanced postgraduate student leadership skills
- All improved our public engagement skills (benefits for writing papers)
Sophie Louth (Engineering):
- “Hands Up”. Hands Up was a school workshop on medical engineering getting young people to build and test their own limb prosthetics
Liam Crowley (Biosciences):
- “Entocast”. Is a successful insect podcast
Pro Amaury Triad (Physics):
- Short graphic novel about nearby exoplanetary system composed of 7 earth-sized planets. Inspired an Opera!
If research is publicly funded, society has a right to shape research agendas and be involved in decisions about how discoveries are used
Explain research and policy
- Collaborations between researchers and public services
- The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Social Science and Policy bring together parliamentarians and social scientists to demonstrate the relevance and value of social science research
- Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) provides advice and support on engaging with parliamentarians
What is mental wellbeing?
- How we feel
- Our ability to cope with daily life
- What feels possible right now
State tips for improving wellbeing
- Take a break
- Do something I enjoy
- Try mindfulness
- Tech-free time
- Drawing, music, baking, etc.
- Spend time outdoors
- Bring nature indoors
- Spend time with animals
- Talk to friends you trust
- Speak to your PAT
- Join a society
- Volunteer
- Eat regular meals
- Try to keep active
- Avoid excessive alcohol
- Routine
- Avoid screens
- Wind down before bedtime
What barriers are there to wellbeing and how can you tackle them?
- Being too busy
Time out can help with productivity, creativity and wellbeing - Not having the financial resources
Are there free activities that I can participate in? - Feeling too tired
Can I be guided by how I would like to feel instead of how I am feeling now?
Define mindfulness (Kabat-Zinn, 1994)
Paying attention in a particular way
- On purpose
- In the present moment
- Without judgement
Explain everyday mindlessness (Siegel et al., 2009)
- Living in autopilot
- Mental time travel
- Wishing away this moment
What are the pros and cons of autopilot?
Pros:
- Evolutionary advantage
- Automates some of our experience through habit
- Allows us to complete incredibly complex tasks without much conscious input
Cons:
- Forget to make contact with present experience
- Miss simple wonderful moments of each day
- Less aware of initial stress-related thoughts, feelings and sensations until they become problematic
You are not your thoughts (WIlliams and Penman, 2011) - how can this be put into practice?
- Changing our relationship with the content of our minds
- Not pushing thoughts, feelings, sensations away
- Nor getting caught up in the content of our minds
- Seeing contents of the mind as mental events
- Noticing what comes into the mind’s stream without judgement
Practice, practice, practice (Williams and Penman, 2011) - how can this be put into practice?
- Body scan
- Mindful movement
- Sounds and thoughts
- Mindful breathing
- Exploring difficulty
- 3 minute breathing space
What is the evidence for mindfulness?
- Bohlmeijer et al. (2009) - meta-analysis of RCT’s - physical health
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) has small effect sizes on depression, anxiety and psychological distress in people with chronic medical diseases - Khoury et al. (2015) - meta-analysis - healthy adults
MBSR has large effects on stress, moderate effect on anxiety, depression, distress and QoL (quality of life), and small effect on burnout in healthy adults - Taylor et al. (2014) - RCT - University students
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) self-help significantly reduced depression, anxiety and stress, and increased life satisfaction, mindfulness and self-compassion relative to a control
What are our sources of support?
- Your personal academic tutor
- LES wellbeing Canvas pages
- Psychology wellbeing officers, Chantelle and Becca: psy-leswellbeing@contacts.bham.ac.uk
What is sunk cost fallacy, and what is a solution to it?
Sunk cost fallacy:
Where a person is reluctant to abandon something because they have invested heavily in it, even though it’s clear that abandonment would be more beneficial
Solution:
When you think you might be spending too much time on an activity, step back and evaluate its importance (e.g. how valuable is the outcome, who will be affected if it’s finished or not finished, etc.)
