March has been full of adventure and as we near the end of the month lockdown rules here in Wales have been relaxed and I look forward to slightly more options to venture away from home… safely. Cause of (cautious) celebration. So this is my March in ten tweets: FemEdTech Curation and International Women’s Day 2021 It was my privilege to reflect on my fourth year of volunteering as a guest curator for 2 weeks…
Category: leadership
We’ve previously written about how important a blended approach is to leading a virtual team (in this post from 2019 about delivering in person events as a virtual team and in this podcast) but the past year has changed that conversation on a global scale. What’s best? Getting ‘back to the office’? Staying with working from home? Who decides and what should we base this decision on? Having led my team from being office based…
Dedicated to the one and only @CosmoCat #ds106radio – listening along https://t.co/dq8h8SKCu2 rockin' this Sunday Special https://t.co/6ANQQqjvbw — Dr Maren Deepwell (@MarenDeepwell) March 7, 2021 This Sunday’s Sunday Special has a special International Women’s Day theme – and we started the show by playing an awesome tune by last week’s guest Chahira Nouira and her band the Max Funk Institute 🙂 Plants! One of my strategies for getting through lockdown/pandemic burnout is to have a…
Last month, we, that is my whole team, blogged about celebrating three years as a virtual team! It was really, really enjoyable and rewarding for me as CEO to read the words and hear the voices of all of my colleagues. I am so grateful that some took the plunge to blog for the first time and others made time to contribute in the face of a big workload. It was a big deal for…
Next Friday, I am having a Strategy Away Day – pandemic style. In past years, when I need time to really focus on strategy, I was often able to take an afternoon or a whole day and spend it with some members of my Board, colleagues or external contacts, having conversations over coffee or whilst walking in a park. My first mentor Margaret and I often spent hours walking through whichever city we met in,…
One of my strategies for getting through lockdown/pandemic burnout is to have a lot of green in my workspace. I can see at least six plants from where I sit each day. Some of them are good at cleaning the air, some grow in intricate pattern and some grow in interesting shapes. Having discovered that I love succulents, I went about finding a local supplier and thanks to the wonderful Blasus Succulent Emporium, which is…
Three years ago this week, we closed the door on our last physical office space and moved to becoming a distributed team. Since then, we have chronicled the journey we have been on as an organisation and as a staff team in regular blogposts, podcasts and conference papers, starting with this post from February 2018. A year on, in January 2019, I reflected on how the move changed things in this blog post and we also recorded a podcast. Last…
Ever since the phrase “new normal” became part of our vocabulary, I’ve struggled to figure out what it means. Over the past year, it’s become clear that when in comes to Learning Technology, COVID-19 has created many opportunities. So whilst it’s not all bad news, it’s certainly not normal. Not today at least. Before I started my working day today, I was on the phone arranging volunteer responders to pick up medication for my parents,…
Like everyone else, I found last year very tough indeed, even with several key advantages: I have years of experience in my role; I had weathered other crisis before this one and I knew how to manage some of what 2020 threw at us; I had successfully led the transition to us working online a few years ago and we were thus able to continue our work with less disruption than many others. I am…