I think the biggest area of growth I have experienced so far is in terms of my technical skills. I started out knowing little to nothing about programs like WordPress, StoryMaps, and Audacity, but now I feel very confident in my abilities to use those programs. In specific, I feel most confident with WordPress and its Elementor plugin, as I used those for my project and thus spent the most time with them. While first daunting, they now feel manageable.
Nonetheless, there are some programs I could stand to learn more from. ArcGIS in particular feels the most foreign and my memory of it is hazy. Moreover, I think I could improve my mentoring skills. I’ve only had a few opportunities to mentor other students and while I felt I learned from the interactions, I wonder what I could have done better. Sometimes I felt unsatisfied due to the fact that the problem the student had was something outside my wheelhouse.
Overall, I had the most fun with programs like StoryMaps and WordPress. There’s this Youtube channel called SecretBase that runs a video series called Chart Party, hosted by sportswriter Jon Bois. Every video is an elegant dance of chartwork, and intentionally working with information layout in StoryMaps and WordPress reminds me of one of these Chart Parties. These videos are fascinating in the way they zoom in and out, spatially linking seemingly disparate ideas to one another. I wonder if there are other programs like StoryMaps that could accomplish such a feat. PowerPoint could be an option, but I am already fairly knowledgeable with it.
All this in mind though, I would like to spend this semester focusing on mentoring skills and exploring new and old tools I am unfamiliar with. In regard to the form, I will try to sit near the front of the digital studio, so that I can notice if students need help quicker. Unfortunately, I will just have to wait until the next opportunity to hone this skill, unless I gain a magical power to make a mentee martialize. As for technical skills, I think I could revisit old trainings or search new third-party trainings for programs like ArcGIS, or even Excel. Additionally, could I seek out new programs to learn? My understanding is that Blender is a free software, and one that I would be personally interested in learning. Is this a program that it would be useful for a Vivero Fellow to know about?