As I have posted before, one of the main reasons I use social media (such as Twitter and blogs) is as part of my own personal development. Along with many other people using these platforms, I follow experts in my areas of interest and monitor their blogs in the hope that I can learn from them – and so far I have learnt an enormous amount.
This is a great way to learn and keep up-to-date in your fields of interest, but one of the challenges is how to retain some of the great information you learn, so that you can apply it as and when you need to. With other forms of learning there are ways to instantly implement newly gained knowledge, or coursework, tests or exams to help retain information. With social media there is a danger of reading something, retweeting it and then forgetting it forever. I have lost count of the amount of times I have vaguely recalled reading something and then spent ages trying to find it again on search.twitter.com, or going way back through my timeline!
For 6 months or so I have tried to keep a paper-based learning log, only to recently flick through it and see days and days (or more like weeks and weeks) of empty pages! Surely there must be a better way?
I recently stumbled across a neat website that goes some way towards solving this problem. Although not its primary function, www.ohlife.com sends me a daily email to remind me to make a diary entry and all I have to do to maintain my learning log is to reply to the email with something I have learnt that day. This could be something I read in a blog post, a conversation I had on Twitter, or an experience I had at work that I want to reflect and learn from. I can then go back through all of my entries, or read a random entry, such as this entry that I posted after reading the book “The Art of Being Brilliant” by Andy Cope and Andy Whittaker.
If you are reading this, then maybe you are also on the knowledge quest. If so, I would love to hear how you ensure the knowledge you gain online sticks in your memory… and, if you have come across any other neat website or apps that aid with this, I would love for you to share them below…:
Happy learning 
