Sometimes in life you have to make a stop, step
back from your path and watch all you have done so far to understand where are
you heading, or why are you even heading that way. I guess it´s a little moment
of introspection and selfdiscovery you sometimes have to dive into to set up
new goals for your next steps.
Lately, due to my exile situation i kinda felt like
i was letting myself fade from the general view. I was so troubled with
external problems i didn´t left time enough for my self-improvement, so i
decided to invest a bit in myself and my external world visibility, both personal and professional.
Through the last weeks i discovered lots of
interesting websites that caught my attention and i decided to share with
whoever is in need of a bit of self-loving.
Coursera is an
online e-learning platform that allows you to partake in classes of
international universities, from your home, whenever you want, free...
Yeah, not joking. It´s not everybody that has time or money to afford
higher education this days so this option comes like a blessing for those like
me who still want to learn something but want to do so while on pajamas at
home.
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| An example of coursera´s course offering. |
While the offer is great, I didn´t found any
appealing course until some weeks ago when i enrolled in two courses that have
resulted in a very engaging and interesting experience. Strategic Innovation on Organizations, from Vanderbilt University and Gamification, from the
university of Pennsylvania. The professors are very knowledgeable and provide
clear explanations and interesting debates, and the best point is i don´t feel like i have that pressure from
taking lectures at the university. I really recommend any of you willing to
learn something new to head to coursera to check out all they have to offer.
I found accredible through a fellow coursera
colleague. Accredible is a really new platform (in fact it officially launched
this week) that allows you to create online catalogues of information for the
courses you have taken. The original point is to prove you actually did that
course to a possible employer, but it also doubles as an efficient place to
store your course notes and assignments.
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| An example of Accredible certificate. |
The page is still new and they still have some improvements to make but they seem to be heading on the right direction.
I highly recommend you give it a try, especially to those who do online
courses in platforms like coursera, as is a good place to store online the info without the risk of getting your notes lost in your closet or HD. Highly recommended too if you want to enhance your skills
visibility for possible employers.
Smarterer is a collaborative website that produces
tests about different skills and bases the difficulty of the answers in the
amount of people who managed to answer them correctly. This way provides tests
that scale in difficulty with your level for a variety of skills.
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| An example of a Smarterer Scorecard |
The point is that the test grades your level on the
skill and assigns a point based value, displayed on a badge on a scorecard that
you can share with others, for example, in LinkedIn (which is currently
integrated) to show others what your skill level truly is instead of just have
your personal word on it.
Also, highly recommended for you guys looking for a
new job.
About.me is a service that offers you a simple,
visual homepage where you can centralize your online presence. It can be linked
to all your social media accounts, your blog, and some other nice features like
your Smarterer scorecard. It´s ideal if you are looking to have a place where
people can find you or your work with ease. I´ve already created my page and i
plan to use it as a signature for emails and blogposts.
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I hope all this pages are useful for you as they
are being for me. I´ll try to post some more webs and apps that I find interesting
during this voyage of self-discovery.
