I saw some tweets awhile back about showing your work or working aloud, and the concept ties in nicely with my discussions on portfolio building, so I figured it was a good opportunity to create a greater awareness!
Show Your Work
Showing your work and working aloud are really about sharing how you got from point A to point B with an audience. Such sharing serves to enlighten your audience, and while some examples they may have previously encountered, if you continue sharing your work, your audience will undoubtedly learn something and some point.
When I started this blog, I went at it from an Instructional Design professional looking for work perspective. Blog posts were focused on clients, and had less of focus on imparting knowledge to my actual audience. Once I realized that my audience was coming primarily for the instructional design and freelance wisdom, I switched focus to cater to that audience. Initially I thought that I would see a decline in the amount of prospective clients I had, but that wasn’t the case. And, I get to share the small wealth of information I have with a group of individuals who can genuinely benefit from such information.
Ways of Showing Your Work
Now, there are so many ways for you to show your work: participating in forum discussions, creating and sharing infographics, recording screencasts, creating demos, sharing walkthroughs of how you got from point A to point B, creating day-in-the-life posts.
My explanatory posts that accompany my E-Learning Heroes Challenge entries are always very popular, and I like to think that it’s because I provide an explanation of the concept, the method I took in achieving the concept, and finally I show the result, which is typically a full demo of the interaction or free download.
Free downloads are a great way of sharing your work, because they allow users to reverse-engineer your interactions to suit their needs OR use the interaction ‘off-the-shelf’/as-is.
Screencast demos are another crowd-pleaser. These videos get a lot of views from folks looking to solve problems, so when you share your solution, it makes a small pocket of the world that much less problematic!
Of course these are just a small sampling of ways that you can show your work, so get creative!
Leave a Reply