What a joy it is to learn something completely unexpected while standing in line at the grocery store, waiting for dinner to arrive at a restaurant, a few moments after waking up via my professional learning network (PLN). As this blog entry, GarROTE Learning, points out…

Our brains get more efficient as we do things. Our brain function improves as we learn something, then move onto the next. If we dwell on the same activity–say, how to use an online system like Moodle, Edmodo, Schoology, an iPad app–then our cortical energy decreases as our brain gets more efficient (Source: 5 Ways to Maximize Your Cognitive Potential). 

Social media certainly enables us to get a mental stimulation from sharing and learning something new. We’re all social media junkies…that is to say, we’re addicted to new things.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vala-afshar/top-100-most-social-k-12_b_7105352.html

Although I’m long past the excitement that is generated from “Social media will save your life! Twitter…PLN tool of choice for millions can satisfy all your PD needs!” type presentations, I am glad that I’ve taken the steps to make my learning transparent.

As you might imagine, there are zillions of folks on various social media networks, sharing and engaging with others about what they are learning as they are learning it. My sharing efforts have gotten much simpler since I first crafted this design:

Now, the process is simple:

As you might imagine, Pocket and Twitter Favorites are my content curation efforts. For content curation, I also rely extensively on Flipboard App, which I use on my Android phone and iPad for casual reading. Most of my sharing there ends up in one of the following Flipboard eMagazines I manage:

View my Flipboard Magazine.https://cdn.flipboard.com/web/buttons/js/flbuttons.min.js
View my Flipboard Magazine.https://cdn.flipboard.com/web/buttons/js/flbuttons.min.js
View my Flipboard Magazine.https://cdn.flipboard.com/web/buttons/js/flbuttons.min.js

And, I also managed this publication which is for articles of interest at my workplace:
View my Flipboard Magazine.https://cdn.flipboard.com/web/buttons/js/flbuttons.min.js

Ideally, Flipboard would auto-publish to my Twitter feed the address of a magazine once I added a certain number of articles to it, but…that may yet be in its future! For now, I have to manually share the links to the Flipboard magazines.