Hello readers 🙂
This is a quick post to let you know that I am starting to wind down activity on this blog for 2018. Don’t worry though, we’ll be ramping it back up again in 2019.
There will still be a few new blog posts before the year is up, because I set myself the goal of reaching 300 blog posts by the end of the year, and I am only 8 posts away from achieving that!
You could argue that this post is a cheeky way to get 1 extra post (and you would be totally right).
The main reason that I am winding back activity on this blog is because I will be devoting a lot more of my energy on having my Mental Fitness Course ready for Orientation Week, 2019.
I initially wrote about developing a mental fitness course back in August. Since then I’ve spoken to a number of students and staff about it, and there is definitely excitement and curiousity about the upcoming course. My ideas about how the course will be structured and the core content have changed a bit since my original post, but the basics are the same. The course will teach you how to develop mental fitness in your own life, and how that can be used to improve wellbeing, as well as your academic performance.
The course will be voluntary, but we’ll look into getting Horizon Awards points attached to the course, so you can get formal acknowledgement of completing it. It will be self-paced, so you can engage with it on your own schedule.
The course will be developed on FLO, in particular on the current Wellbeing for Academic Success FLO topic. If you want to watch it take shape over the holiday period, consider signing up to that topic.
I want to say thank you to all of you that have read the blog
I want to express my sincere thanks to all of you who have read or subscribed to the blog over the past 18 months. We (Health, Counselling and Disability Services) launched the blog as a bit of an experiment to see if we could deliver additional resources to students, outside of the excellent direct work that our GPs, nurses, counsellors and disability advisors do.
We consider that experiment a bit of a success. We’ve had over 23000 unique visitors to the blog this year, and 1700+ students subscribe to the blog. Many of the posts on this blog have become hard-copy resources that we distribute to students in need. Because of some of the posts on this blog (e.g. this one), I’ve been asked to come and speak to groups of students, which has been an amazing opportunity. I look forward to giving more presentations next year.
We definitely know we have room to improve in terms of promoting the blog, and helping students access the specific posts that are going to be helpful for them, but we’ve had a great start.
If you read, interacted with or shared any blog posts this year, I would like to thank you from the bottom of my heart. Without a readership and student support, this Blog wouldn’t survive. In fact, without students
I would also like to thank all of those people who contributed to the blog by writing posts (Nurse Tim, Kellie, Eloise), or participating in discussions that resulted in posts (Khristin, Stephen). I hope to engage a lot more guests and guest writers in the process in 2019.
We’ll be back
I’ll be ramping up activity on this blog again in February 2019, so please stay tuned. If you are already subscribed to the blog then just wait to hear from us again in the new year. If you aren’t, I suggest signing up so you know when we return.
If you’d like to get in contact with me over the break, with ideas or suggestions about the blog for 2019, please don’t hesitate to email me on gareth.furber@flinders.edu.au
Take Care