Analysing the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats Involved in Making Videos

 

 When you do something that requires a lot of effort, it tends to be convenient to analyse what you're doing, taking a look at your own strengths and weaknesses as well as the opportunities and threats inherent in your environment. Why? Well, you may aim too high and burn out by trying to do something you're not yet up to. You can avoid that not by abandoning (that would be an extreme case), but by using your strengths to overcome your weaknesses. Sometimes you may even find a way to turn your weaknesses into strengths -kind of like aikido.

 As for opportunities and threats (I find the latter word a bit too strong, but it's the conventional way to phrase it), it's basically the same. Opportunities are those things in our environment that we tend to encourage what we're doing, while Threats are those that, unless ameliorated, neutralised, or used against themselves (aikido again) may end up converting your endeavour into a wild-goose chase. Like, for instance, expending a lot of energy making videos for students who don't have access to the internet.

 For my own case, I've made the following analysis: 

  On the whole, the conclusion I draw from my analysis is that I definitely ought to go on working on this whole YouTube/videos thing. The Strengths and Opportunities outweigh the Weaknesses and Threats, I'd say. 

  Still, just confirming or not what you're doing isn't really what this kind of analysis is all about, is it? The important thing is to take all this and turn it into Tasks. Thinking about it, I came up with the following:

Tasks 

• Find a way to increase my efficiency in producing videos.
• Design attractive and useful projects to carry out with students for them to make their own videos.
• Keep a close watch on the level. This may mean making use of the teleprompter more often -it's easier to monitor the language in a written script.
• Adhere to the KISS acronym: Keep It Short and Simple. 

 

  So, I basically know what I need to do now. Let's go and do it!