Tweets Week of 3/28/14

Week of 3/17/14 (make-up)

Westercon Tweets- 3/13/14

Tweets for 3/6/14

I scheduled tweets on the hootsuite account before it got closed out. The tweets were about 1) online vs. paper resumes, 2) kids and their reading 3) a retweet from an author about a story.

Writing Excuses Podcast

Where do you go as an adult to get more education about writing?

• Writing and writing and writing (practice) is a good technique, but the best writers are those who practice the right techniques and perfect them.
• Be able to recognize your mistakes and improve it-writing workshops can help you with that!
• At any point in your career, you can still gain benefits from going to a teacher, writing workshop, or writing group.
• At these writing shops sometimes they articulate something you already know, but they take it from the known part of your brain to the verbal part of your brain so that you can then pass it on to someone else.

·      Valuable work shops:

•  Clarion and Clarion west—6 weeks long and each week you have a different guest instructor.
•  Literary Boot Camp
• Bible Paradise
• Norwestcon: professionals critique your story
• Writing Superstars: a lot of business related stuff
• Odyssey
• Towst Tool Box: deals with novel and short stories
• Launchpad: NASA funded
• Writing Excuses
• I Should Be Writing

·      Online resources:

•  SFWA.org-information center that has nuts and bolts of writing
• Turkey City Lexicon: the said-book-ism, where everything is ‘she said brightly’: a list of phrases that are talking about common mistakes. An enummarted list of writing pitfalls.
• Magicalwords: a group blog
• Book view cafe:

·      A word about workshops:

•   It takes a while to internalize the tools that you learn at workshops. If you go to one of these workshops, recognize that things will be hard because you have new tools.
• You will learn dozens of things, take 3 post-it notes and write three lessons that you have learned and focus on those things. Once you have mastered those things, you can pull it off and put on another one.
•  Start with what is most difficult for you and that is where you will make the most progress.

Blog Post Restoring American Communities

3. One form of social capital is official membership in volunteer organizations. According to Putnam, there are three main types of volunteer organizations in American society: (1) Community-based organizations, (2) church-based organizations and (3) work-based organizations. Which of these types of organizations do you get most involved with? 

Out of these types of organizations I get the most involved with 1) Community-based organizations and 2) church-based organizations.

My husband and I volunteer at an organization called IRC. We help tutor refugees for two hours on Saturdays. These refugees are taken from their war-torn countries and are relocated in Salt Lake City. We love being with the refugees and making new friends. We even share these fun times on Facebook and Instagram with our friends because they are so important to us.

We are also planning the World’s Largest Pillow Fight (I think I have mentioned this in class already). It is really cool how social media allows us to spread the word and gather donations. The IRC websites even lets people do their own DIY projects and make their own pages through their websites.

Community involvement has been able to grow quicker and farther because of social media. We are able to share our causes, ask for help and show progress. Social capital will continue to grow because of the web and social media. 

The second way I get involved with social capital is through church-based organizations. Growing up in the church we are always doing volunteer/service projects. One of the recent ways I have been able to do volunteer work (in the broad sense of the phrase) is through family search. My husband and I are taking a family search class at church and we are learning the skills to do genealogy and do ordinances for people. The church has been able to leverage the internet to for volunteer opportunities. 

I have been able to be involved in many volunteer opportunities and have been able to offer those same opportunities through others through the internet and social media. We have been given powerful tools and it is cool to see the opportunities that come from using them!