We are currently recruiting for a Chief Operations Officer for ALT, and I couldn’t be more excited! It’s always great when you get to grow your team, particularly when there are only seven of you and each individual makes a big impact. Why this role, why now? We are the leading professional body for Learning Technology in the UK – and we have been pretty busy in the past eighteen months! Learning Technology has never…
Category: open practice
OERxDomains21 is still going on as I am writing this and I am looking forward to some great post-conference workshops closing a week of extraordinary online open education conferencing. If you haven’t already done so, there are a couple of things you don’t want to miss: All the sessions are now openly accessible to all, as part of our commitment to the Open COVID for Education pledge. Browse the keynotes, dig into research, learn about…
Recently I contributed to a conversation around radical openness as part of the OLC’s Ideate online events, together with Robin DeRosa, Gerry Hanley, Leigh Graves Wolf and Rajiv Jhangiani. I was very glad to be invited and really enjoyed taking part. The session, described as a ‘community salon’ was described in the programme as an “opportunity for a group of thought leaders to engage participants in rich discussions around a broad topic intersecting with their…
It’s International Women’s Day #IWD2020 and this year I am writing this post about washing. What is this about? Women’s labour? Household chores? Automation of domestic labour?No. What I am thinking about is the concept of ‘openwashing’ and similar kinds of ‘washing’ and how to avoid drowning in that kind of dirty laundry. I came across this first at the OER15 conference in Cardiff in a memorable keynote by Cable Green: As an aside, OER15…
In a recent post on positive feedback I talked about how to use positive feedback for personal & professional development. As I wrote the post I had an idea to try out a new approach to giving and receiving positive feedback in a virtual, distributed team: I made a template and sent an envelope to each of my colleagues in the post, enclosing a piece of positive feedback from me to them, as well as…
I recently came across this article in the Harvard Business Review on how to use positive feedback for personal & professional development. The article points to a tool/service but in itself contains useful pointers and ideas explaining why positive feedback is important, how to give/receive it and reflecting on why this may be difficult: ‘Most people are well-attuned to critical feedback; it is jarring, threatening, and emotional, and as a result, quite memorable. In contrast,…
OER19 is nearly upon us and as part of the organising team the next two week will be really busy for me. I am really excited about the event this year and so while there’s still time, I want to share my thoughts in this preview post. I’ve also been reading Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez (it’s an excellent read) and one of the points I took away from the book was how women’s…
This post is for the inclusive Open Space session coming up at OER19 in April. You can read all about the session here. It is posted on the FEMEDTECH OER19 OPEN SPACE. Here is a link directly to the post. I have chosen to focus on the question: “How do we manage sustainable spaces for exploring challenging issues around open?” and my response has also been inspired by a recent blog post by Martin Weller…
It’s my second time to volunteer as a guest curator for the @femedtech Twitter account and in the past year, since my last time as a curator, much has changed. In 2018, I followed Helen Beetham, being only the second person to try out how to be a guest curator. At the time, the account had 122 followers, had tweeted about the same number of tweets and we were just in the process of writing…