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Maren Deepwell Posts

Virtual Teams: CPD and CO2

Welcome to this month’s post (cross-posted here) in which we, that is Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey) and Maren Deepwell (@marendeepwell), openly share our approach to leading a virtual team.  If you haven’t come across our work before or like to find out more, you can catch up on earlier posts on our blogs, podcasts or find out more about ALT, the organisation we work for. This time we talk about staff benefits and CPD opportunities for…

Talking about leading a Virtual Team #OEB19

This is a special #OEB19 post (cross-posted here) sharing our conference session: Leading Change through Open Conversational Digital Practice. In the session the two of us, that is Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey) and Maren Deepwell (@marendeepwell), openly share our approach to leading a virtual team.  As a senior staff team working in educational technology we have worked for the past two years to develop a conversational digital professional practice that enables us to focus on mission-led…

Is a strategy all about the future?!

Creating strategies is a big part of my work. Some are small and fit a particular purpose, others span an entire organisation and many years. It’s the second kind that I am currently working on as ALT is half way through setting out a new strategy for 2020-2025. Our process involves many people, with their own views, ideas and voices and it’s all the richer for it. ALT’s Chair, Sheila, and I, blog about our…

Virtual Teams #OEB19 preview: Leading Change through Open Conversational Digital Practice

Welcome to this month’s post (cross-posted here) in which we, that is Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey) and Maren Deepwell (@marendeepwell), openly share our approach to leading a virtual team.  How is the way we work and communicate changing as we work in ever-more-distributed ways? In this special #OEB19 post we give you a preview of the work we will share at the conference and the conversation we hope our session will prompt.  As a senior staff…

Letter making and reflection

I have been watching a documentary series recently on the art of design, and one episode about Jonathan Hoefler: Typeface Design in particular captured my imagination. It’s an amazing glimpse into a professional and creative practice that combines material and digital elements effortlessly. Anything from maps in museum collections to books and wooden blocks to visualisation tools and digital pens is part of the process of creating a new typeface, which then is used both…

Virtual Teams outtakes: Home-worker / house-worker…

This post, which is an ‘outtake’ from my regular series of Virtual Teams posts with Martin Hawksey, is me thinking out loud about how working from home can lead to doing a lot of housework. I reflect on how to avoid being landed with all the chores because you are based at home and how maybe you can make housework work for you for reclaiming some balance. Working from home = doing the work of the…

Virtual Teams: Strategy unpacked… how being a virtual team is changing our organisation

Welcome to this month’s post (cross-posted here) in which we, that is Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey) and Maren Deepwell (@marendeepwell), openly share our approach to leading a virtual team.  This time we talk about how much strategic progress we have made in the last few years and how being a virtual team has contributed to that. We also discuss our values as an organisation, how we have tried to reduce our impact on the environment and…

Keynote: 4th Annual Further Education Technology Forum and FELTAG, six years on…

This week I am looking forward to contributing to the 4th Annual Further Education Technology Forum in London. It’s a great opportunity for me to spend a day learning from and listen to colleagues who work for FE providers and I very much value the practical insights that the day affords me. This year, due to some fortunate circumstances beyond our control, I am delighted to speak together with Bob Harrison, whom I have known…

Unsettled… a very personal blog post

On Friday, on my afternoon off, I went to my local library to use their Android device to apply for permission to settle in the UK. Ironically, I live in West Oxfordshire, David Cameron’s former constituency, and whilst that means that I am often surrounded by people in 4x4s viewing ‘affordable’ new homes starting at £580k, it is the kind of place that postcards of the Cotswolds often feature: yellow stone cottages with roses growing…

Virtual Teams: The perfect blend? Bringing the skills of distributed teams to face-to-face events (special podcast edition)

Welcome to this month’s post (cross-posted here) in which we, that is Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey) and Maren Deepwell (@marendeepwell), openly share our approach to leading a virtual team. This time we talk about how we as a digitally and geographically distributed team connect face to face and why we think a blended approach is important.  New here? Catch up on earlier posts, podcasts or find out more about ALT.  August Maren: from the outset our…