Category: technology

Mindful Digital Collage Exercise

Posted on by Maria Bo in content creation, Digital, elearning, healing, Health, mindfulness, technology

Put aside 1 hour for this but there is no time limit. This activity is meant to keep us in the “being” mode where we can give our mind a break (parasympathetic nervous system) from the stress of always “doing”.

Here is a digital collage I created using Canva. For this exercise, I didn’t have anything in mind, I just placed random images and text onto my canvas. Once complete, I spent time looking at the themes that emerged such as travel, animals, and the colour yellow. While doing this, my mind is present while observing, turning this into a mindful seeing practice. If my mind wanders, I am aware of it and guide my mind back to the image.

Combined in this activity are three practices:

  1. Breathing practice – close your eyes and listen to your breath, observe your body for 10 mins.
  2. Collage practice – drop visuals and text onto your canvas, don’t think too hard just allow yourself to be free and have fun.
  3. Seeing practice – observe your collage for about 5 mins, taking in the themes, colours, patterns and textures.

There are two ways you can approach this exercise:

  1. Breathing > Creating > Seeing
  2. Create > Seeing > Breathing

How to produce a digital collage:

  1. Sign up at Canva.ca for a free account
  2. Select “Create Design” top right hand corner and pick a format
  3. Go to “Elements” located on the left hand side to search for images
  4. Go to “Text” located under Elements to add text and explore fonts and sizes
  5. When finished click “Share” >Download>JPG>Download to save file

Alternatively you can also make a paper collage by cutting and pasting clippings to a sheet of paper or scrapbook. I use the digital format because I don’t have access to clippings to work with.

Be sure to come back to your collage whenever you want to do a seeing practice. You can print it out, move it to your device or place as your computer wallpaper.

There is much more you can do with Canva than I have outlined here but this will get you started and exploring the ecosystem. Have fun and feel free to share your finished collage!

collage of a mindful exercise built in Canva application

Mindful Media Production

Posted on by Maria Bo in Digital, healing, mindfulness, technology, youtube
photo of an old big leaf maple tree
Photo taken with GoPro Hero12

You don’t need me to remind you of how now more than ever, is a good time to practice some mindful media consumption. This means, selecting digital media to look at that is calming to the nervous system while also keeping your mind in the present. My YouTube channel has recently undergone a facelift and theme change to accommodate for this objective. There, you will find shorts and videos of nature sights and sounds. While it is important to get into a real natural space more than anything, if you are unable to reach a forest or green space or just need immediate access to something calming then watching nature content is helpful for reducing stress. I recently acquired a GoPro Hero12 creator kit and have been using this to build up some new content on my YouTube channel; I shoot the longer videos in landscape mode on the GoPro and the shorter videos (shorts which garner the most attention at this time) with my iPhone in portrait mode. The shorts are small bursts of fun while the videos are longer serene digital forest baths for longer mindful practice. Both formats will bring positive results to the viewer and is a means to offset whatever other harmful (negative) media they maybe consuming.

Visit my YouTube channel here: www.youtube.com/@curiousbo

YouTube Journey, Academy & Tips

Posted on by Maria Bo in elearning, technology, youtube

I wrote this blog post in 2019 and thought I would post it here. There have been some changes to my YouTube account since I have written this blog post but most of what I have written about still applies today. Today I am focusing on YouTube’s new “shorts” format but I will go into that in another post.

I’ve been uploading clips to my YouTube account since its inception in 2005. In the beginning, I didn’t think much of it other than a place to store and share my videos as back then, one had to upload a video to their own server to share it – and what a huge pain in the ass that was. It was a cumbersome process and not convenient in the slightest. YouTube’s arrival was a huge relief for multimedia producers like myself. So, I uploaded a variety of clips from stand alone candid clips to short composed videos. To date, I have obtained a 92% like rate on 4,692,855 views (6,193,022 in 2023) on my clips – not too shabby for someone who neglected their account for several years. Early on, one of my videos got picked up by the Ellen Degeneres Show and several other clips were discovered and licensed by TV shows. But more than that, it’s been a place where interesting conversations have unfolded in the most unexpected way, and it is why I am returning to it today.

In 2016, I completed my MA research analyzing YouTube comments of one of my popular videos where I learned that videos positive in nature (with a genuine surprise element) are most liked, shared and have higher chances of going viral than negative ones. By todays standard (2019), the video is viral (4 million views and climbing over 12 years – 5.5 million in 2023) but in most recent years, more videos have gained momentum more quickly than they did back in the day – due to the platforms massive growing viewership. And so my one clip (of an orca and a dog interacting) continues to climb in views, likes, shares and comments, and it was here where I did my research. I have a few other clips that are doing well but are not viral in the same sense of the first one. A couple of years have passed since doing my Masters and this year I have seriously aligned my attention with the YouTube platform for the first time.

For many years, I ignored my YouTube account completely. What I mean is that I purposely didn’t look at it. Why? Due to an anxiety condition to be honest. Sounds silly right? Well, my one viral video was connected to a bigger story in my life – that of a famous orca named Luna, who I worked with in 2003. The story became world famous and was highly contentious. Because I had been involved, I got stuck right in the middle of it all and it caused me quite a bit of stress. Quite frankly, I didn’t want to look at any of it. Back then the Internet was not as rampant with lynch mobbing and cyber attacks. Today, cyber bullying has caused people to commit suicide and the problem seems to be only getting worse. One just has to do a quick search on the topic to find the pages of evidence. It has become a very concerning situation. And as for me? I didn’t want to see the growing attention of my video(s) but I intuitively knew to leave my work up and that maybe one day I’ll come around.

Over the years I continued to feed the machine as to speak, but not spending too much time on my channel – so upload and ignore. I did add titles and keywords but they were minimal at best, but again back in the day, YouTube wasn’t a viral platform as it has become today. Other than looking at other unrelated content (which I did much of), I ignored my own. That is until now. It is now 2019 and it’s a new year. 2018 was a rough year where I faced some big health obstacles (requiring a couple of hospitalizations; surgeries and organs removed) and with that behind me, my anxieties have dimmed. This has given me a new opportunity to look into things that I had previously ignored or forgotten about. For instance, I used to be an experimental (16mm) filmmaker back in the 90’s and I loved it. My work was screened in festivals, on TV and I was even given an award by the Victoria Film Festival. Enter the 2000’s, and I swapped my passion for filmmaking with that of creating websites – especially with Flash. I got sucked down the Internet rabbit hole and really never came back to filmmaking again. Although after that, I spent a lot of time documenting through video, and that’s where my YouTube channel comes into existence.

I am now revisiting the idea of video making with a new born interest in YouTube. Once better, I decided I would invest in a vlogging microphone that attached to my iPhone and continue to explore with video making. Back when I started out, we used huge clunky 16mm film and (various format) video cameras. It was a very heavy experience but we pulled it off. Today, we have film making machines in the palm of our hands, how convenient is that! I can no longer resist, and so I am returning to these roots. But before I get in too deep, I feel compelled to truly understand YouTube and all of its super powers so that I can truly harness it. In recent years, people have made a living from their YouTube channels and have even become world famous. I am not in this for fame but I would love nothing more than to make it a profession on some level and also help other people with their YouTube endeavours. There is no better way to do this than to study with the YouTube Academy and it’s probably the best thing I have done since doing my Masters.

I have just completed 7 core courses over the past month, and applied my learning in realtime – transforming my dormant account into a living and breathing reflection of myself. I have spent countless hours revising the metadata on 296 videos (and still am repairing videos) which includes correcting titles to reflect better analytic search results, beefing up keywords and creating custom thumbnails for each and every video (a very labour intensive task). I am not finished however I have revised my most viewed videos and am working backwards so that I may breath life into those videos that have been forgotten about. I am fishing clips out of my archive to build new found themes and stories for viewers through my playlists and sections.

As a result, I have become a YouTube analytics junkie – kind of ironic knowing where I started. It really is a worthwhile place to spend some time in order to fully understand where your account is at and how to grow it. I will continue to learn through the Academy as there are more courses I’d like to take but they take some time. I do not recommend flying through them, rather learning with realtime content and applying each and every exercise given, as it helps to transform and build your channel in the best possible way.

To date here are the courses I have completed:

  • After your shoot
  • Before your shoot
  • Building a Global Channel
  • Copyright on YouTube
  • During your shoot
  • Earn money with ads on Youtube
  • Get discovered
  • Get insights with YouTube Analytics
  • Grow your community
  • Hook them with your channel trailer
  • Live streaming on YouTube
  • Platform overview
  • The quickstart guide to YouTube

I will continue to work my way through other courses but I started with the ones I felt were most useful in helping me to get a grip of my current channel and the pile of content I have dumped there. This is also helping me to make decisions on how to direct my future content, by examining my audience through analytics. There is a kind of science involved in this.

With all this said, I feel confident in declaring myself as a YouTube specialist. I will continue to grow this endeavour mindfully with my attention invested on past and future content. I am also capable of helping others with their YouTube endeavours. I now fully understand some of the key components of getting a YouTube channel seen and growing. I have observed many accounts fed with current content but with little to no views. If they just took a few extra steps in shaping their content and channels – it’s best to do it as you go along, as going back over a large volume of content will be time consuming and back breaking. This is why I am undertaking this on a part time schedule. My poor tail bone just cannot take the number of hours required to repair my own channel. Ultimately, all of this has given me the knowledge and experience and can understand how to marry the content with the analytical side of the data. Together with my graphic design skills, I can experiment and transform my content to see what works best.

YouTube Academy is 100% worth the time and energy if you are serious about your YouTube channel. If you don’t have the time and the energy but need assistance for your channel, then you can get in touch with me. There are some critical keys that users need to consider with their channel or it’s really not worth the time at all. I can’t stress this enough; understanding the meta data and analytical side is the most critical to getting this right. I’m constantly amazed at how YouTube continues to grow into what I think is the most powerful platform on the Internet and it promotes a place of creativity, independence and excitement. There is also a reward in all of this, getting paid. Although getting paid is a huge benefit in running a channel, it shouldn’t be what brought you there to begin with. It starts with your passion and if you’re really tied into it, then the rest will follow. As someone who has had a monetized account for several years now and didn’t care about it, I know this first hand. In order to become monetized you need to meet certain criteria first and it’s become harder as of recently. So ultimately it’s really best that you’re driven by your passion and not the money. As YouTube emphasizes over and over in their courses, just keep at it!

My tips for starting out:

  1. Understand your niche(s)
  2. Come up with a branding
  3. Create videos you are passionate about and be yourself
  4. Don’t produce offensive content (stick to community guidelines)
  5. Use proper meta data (titles, keywords, descriptions & thumbnails)
  6. Don’t mislead or spam viewers (including in meta data)
  7. Engage your viewers & ask them to subscribe
  8. Create an upload schedule, let your viewers know about it and stick to it
  9. Understand analytics and utilize it to steer your channel
  10. Use tools such as cards, playlists and sections to group content

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5Pjhkm5EbwMN7hFjDQfGMA
Check out YouTube Academy here: https://creatoracademy.youtube.com/page/education

Blogging with tendonitis

Posted on by Maria Bo in Digital, healing, technology

This blog will be completely created with voice only. Due to ongoing tendonitis of the right hand. Also, my dominant hand for designing and mouse operation means that I must rest my hand. I also use the right hand for crafting purposes. Therefore, I must share my tasks carefully between my different occupations, needless to say I also use my right hand for chopping vegetables and doing other daily tasks as an E bike rider. I also tend to use my right hand more for breaking and the thumb palm area can be impacted typing any sort of body of text can I add strain to the ligaments in my hand, connecting to my arm. For now I keep a brace on my right hand and periodically remove it and do hand strengthening exercises. This blog post is an opportunity for me to experience a little bit of what it is like for somebody who experiences a physical disability. Although my tendonitis may be temporary, it is something that frequently comes and goes enough that I need to put into place more permanent prevention measures. I do not want to stop logging or producing digital content. However, I need to find a better way to mitigate my extended use, employ more therapeutic means, and practice prevention. Although the majority of this blog post will have been dictated by voice. I am learning how to also navigate basic computer operation with my left hand to take some of the strain away from my right hand, which will be reserved for necessary editing, and design tasks that are unable to be achieved with my left hand. This will be the end of this blog post next time I will explore working with a video entry in place of text with captions for those with hearing impairments. I will attempt to include as many accessibility features as I can, and will use my own limitations to learn how to be, more accessible to others with different kinds of disabilities. Thank you for taking the time to read or listen to this blog post. There is instructions under the about. Should you want to know how to hear a blog post instead of reading one.

Update Feb 26, 2024 (Since writing this post, both of my hands were diagnosed with tendonitis making it very difficult to use my left hand for support. I needed to use the voice control system more often in the past few months. My hands have since improved and I am back to typing however I am aware this can happen again as it has happened many times before). To learn more about how to use voice command please go to the drop down under the About tab.

Learning with an Invisible Disability

Posted on by Maria Bo in Digital, elearning, healing, technology

I have been away for a few months, in Ontario and with Covid for a longer period of time than I anticipated but now I am attempting to get my head back in the game although I’ve been feeling a little cognitively unmotivated lately.

For this post, I have decided to introduce “Seed” as a character to accompany a sensitive and uncomfortable topic for me. If you grew up experiencing difficult learning circumstances in school and in society, then this post might both be a trigger and also a catharsis for you, to not feel isolated in your journey. When I decide to talk about this topic, Seed will be there. Seed is a concept where the seed (creative idea) and the nervous system sensitivity are represented together in a cute image, in order to feel safe.

At a very young age, I was diagnosed with a highly sensitive nervous system or HSP (today classified under neurodiverse) and was easily startled by noise. My life-long struggle with sleep began as a toddler and was prescribed (by a doctor) caffeine to fall asleep – this doesn’t work for me as an adult though lol. By the time I reached daycare, I endured a head trauma when an older child threw a brick at my head when I was playing alone in a sandbox, resulting in a rush to the ER for stitches. Further along in elementary school, in order to reduce distraction, a cardboard box was placed around my desk while situated next to the teachers desk, producing a humiliating spectacle in front of my peers. Additionally, I was placed in the special education class as I had difficulty learning. I experienced tremendous anxiety when it came time to reading out loud in class. The teacher would randomly select a student to read and I did everything I could to disappear from being selected. When I would read out loud, I found that I experienced some kind of cognitive delay between reading and speaking and this was traumatic for me causing me to gap and stutter. Even today, I find my eyes can jump around the page. I failed grade 2 and lacked the support around me to nurture my unique learning needs. Additionally, I was bullied at times by other groups of classmates who clearly saw me as an easy target. By the time I reached high school, I had learned how to better blend in, although I moved around often so I didn’t have long before relocating. During grade 11 English class, a girl took my essay prior to handing it in, and read it out loud to the class while laughing out loud, her laugh is forever embedded in my memory. You can already guess that what I wrote wasn’t supposed to be funny but after the fact I realized my writing was so bad that it was accidentally comical. I remember laughing along because her laugh was contagious. I don’t remember being offended just taking note of the event. I forgave her.

To say I was relieved that school was over, was an understatement. I managed to graduate and with decent marks, who knew! Now don’t get me wrong, I actually love learning and have found throughout my adult life that it’s one of my biggest passions. I soon realized after high school that I was destined to take the creative path so I went on to study a BA in Image Arts. I created films that were screened in film festivals and even nominated for awards. After that I enjoyed steady years of creativity while working as a digital designer. I think this is the time in my life where I actually thrived – between my 20s and 30s. In my 40s, I went on to study a MA in Communication and Technology however once again, found myself experiencing some of the obstacles that followed me throughout my childhood. I hired a tutor early on to help establish a proper writing style and confidence. During our in-person residency, I found myself often needing to sit to the side of the class while wearing a hat and sometimes sunglasses as I was so sensitive to the fluorescent lights that I couldn’t concentrate – this created a familiar feeling of humiliation and alienation I felt as a child. During my final in-person residency, I fell ill with N1H1 and struggled to recover to the point that I threatened to quit but was granted an exception with flexibility. My Masters took me 4 years to complete even though I wasn’t doing anything other than part-time design work at the time. I found myself extremely exhausted by the mental tasks of reading mountains of peer-reviewed articles and endless computer screen exposure. I suppose it was no surprise that by the time it was over – yes I finally graduated – I had reached complete burnout, and was diagnosed with a large tumour that resulted in major surgery. Since then, my life has been forever changed.

Realizing I had succumbed to a complete physical breakdown, a life riddled with insomnia, anxiety, IBS, scoliosis, vertigo, and a myriad of other health problems, I had come to terms that I was not able to adapt my body to the world out there and I was going to have to figure out how to find my way. I have spent half a decade practicing and learning stress-relieving healing arts therapies (eco therapy, reflexology, art therapy) as a means of coping and are now built into my daily routine. Ultimately, it is my creativity that has saved me from self-destruction. Without it, I am not sure how I would be coping today. Miraculously, I have not fallen to substance abuse or any other kind of self-destructive habit and I don’t judge others who have. However, I still continue to live with anxiety and uncertainty. I am learning that gratitude is my biggest ally.

Now, in my 50’s, I am taking inventory of my life and looking at the bigger picture. Why has my life been so challenging? Why have I struggled? Why did and why do people treat me differently? Why are some people mentally abusive towards me? What do I need to know about myself so that I can achieve peace and stability in my life? Tired of hiding, masking and pretending, I started to do some online research and found that my life experience is very similar to those who are autistic. It turns out, all of my diagnosed health problems and sensitivities, fall under the umbrella of autism. As it is a spectrum, each person can have different symptoms but we are bound by a few hallmark ones; sensory overload is a big one. I experience quite a few characteristics but I wouldn’t say my case is extreme although enough to impede on my ability to thrive in certain ways. In 2005 after I fell ill from another virus that left me with vertigo issues, I went through a battery of tests and an EEG determined I had a cognitive disability. Although I was motivated to understand my vertigo condition at the time, I now realize this disability has always been there. Learning disabilities also fall under the autism spectrum. I took a series of online tests and they all came back the same – my results fell outside of the “normal” range and were pushing their way about 1/4 of the way up through the autism spectrum. It has been recommended I be analyzed for an official diagnosis but with our medical system being so difficult right now, I will wait. What is important for me is understanding who I am, why I am, and how to go forward with better community and support. I also want to make myself visible to others who like me, are struggling to find their place and people in the world.

After a long break from both academics and digital creative work, I am back but with a new found appreciation in online learning and content creation. Now, unlike when I was growing up, there is better understanding of how people learn and what is needed to accommodate different types of learners. For instance, I am a visual learner and I learn best by doing. Although I employ all forms of learning, there are types that help me to absorb information better than others. I have new found appreciation and excitement for learning because even though I have struggled with it, it is something I love doing on a daily basis. Learning excites and motivates me to live. I no longer compare myself, feel ashamed, feel I need to hide or pretend that I am like everyone else. I know that I am a talented, creative person who has so much to offer. That is the thing with autism, it also comes with gifts. I don’t see it as a disability rather a difference, I no longer see myself as subordinate, just different. I have come to terms with the fact that I process information differently, always have and that I have been deprived time and time again from the flexibility that I needed to learn by and thrive. I am so relieved that things have changed for the better. Although not diagnosed specifically as autistic, I think learning about autism is probably the missing link I needed to discover, in order to better understand who I am, so I can thrive in ways I have not before.

If you find any errors, don’t hesitate to let me know. I can read and reread and not catch them 🙂