A Summer of Learning

I spend a lot of time down in the weeds of technologies that I teach. When I'm not working on course design, I'm reading manpages, perusing old listserv threads, lurking around StackOverflow, and following fascinating Twitter threads about the latest and greatest (or oldest and greatest!) tech. That consumes most of my time and brain bandwidth on a regular basis. Don’t get me wrong, though. I love it all!

This summer, I’m taking a long vacation during which I will try my hardest to not open a Terminal window. I plan to take along the camera I bought a few years ago and have barely used. I plan to listen to a lot of music. I plan to knock out some of the books on my ever-growing Kindle list. And, I’m going to watch some #LinkedInLearning videos that are mostly outside of my usual tech-centric viewing habits.

So, without further ado, and in no particular order, here are the courses on my #SummerLearningList.

I’m interested in the intersection of technology and society, and Foundations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution sounds right up my alley. 

It’s easy to focus too deeply on what we do for work, even if it’s something we enjoy. 

I’m terrible at self-promotion, and it’s a skill I need to work on.

Whenever I sit down to do something, there’s always a dozen other things that pop into my mind.

I’m decent at building things, especially when it comes to PVC-pipe-frames for my patio shade and my home recording space. Yes, I record many of my videos in a blanket fort. It’s a lot of fun! But, it would be nice to get a bit more of a formal foundation in Engineering principles, too.

Time Management is my Achilles Heel. It’s a skill I think we all could get better at.

I’m a fairly introverted kind of person, and often that comes off as being unapproachable. That’s definitely something I need to change.

Product Management is an interesting area for me, coming from a predominantly technical background. I’m curious to see how this role and discipline works.

Python is increasingly popular, and while my PHP and Ruby skills helped me build a lot of useful tools, I think it’s time to switch languages.

Hopefully, I’ll get to all of these. Maybe I won’t. And that’s fine. But I’m looking forward to a summer of learning, whether that’s through #LinkedInLearning videos, or just learning to spend time away from my screen and keyboard.

What’s on your #SummerLearningList? Need a few more suggestions? Check out some courses we recommend to get started.