A year ago this week I locked the door to this office for the last time, handed back the keys to the estate manager (never seen such a tidy move, he said) and left the building – leading my team, my organisation into the brave new world of being a distributed organisation, a virtual team. You can read all about what happened next… the official updates for Members written by Trustees and myself, in formal…
Maren Deepwell Posts
When I was a young teenager, I asked my parents for a (mechanical) typewriter for my birthday so that I could type my journal, plays and poetry – on coloured paper mostly. I didn’t have the internet. When I was an art student, my sketchbooks had pockets, windows, some smelled of strange colours or oils I had tried out, some trailed plaster dust or were covered with fabric. I also had a blog filled with…
It’s not long before International Women’s Day on 8 March and whilst the work of the #femedtech network is not all about women, but about greater equality for everyone, the day is a great opportunity for us to share the work we do, spread the message and reach new supporters. Like many of you, I’m looking forward to sharing ideas, inspiration and some hard hitting facts when I talk about #femedtech and so I am…
Recently I’ve started to form a new habit, to give myself a break each day for something I’ve done or something I haven’t done. It was a kind of afterthought on a list of things, the sort of list you make at the start of the year, when the days are dark and you feel like turning over a new leaf. Yet, it’s been a surprisingly impactful exercise, prompting quite a few realisations about how…
This post continues the series on openly sharing our approach to leading a virtual team – a joint project with Martin Hawksey (cross-posted here) for which we write a monthly blog post and this time recorded a podcast for you, too. What a year… With the transition to becoming a distributed organisation and one year of leading our virtual team under our belt, we reflect on the highs and lows, the good and the bad…
It was a real pleasure to be invited by the organisers of Social Media for Learning in Higher Education to keynote at this year’s conference and this post provides a summary of the talk and slides. You can also access the actual slide deck at https://go.alt.ac.uk/SocMedHE18Keynote . Given that it’s early in the year and a cold, dark morning in Nottingham, UK, I felt it would be useful to start this talk with a sunnier…
I started running a few years ago and unexpectedly found I love it. Ever since, I am grateful for every mile and every moment it brings me. Whether I’m catching the last light of the day or the first… I run to get some head space, to escape, to move, to breathe, to reflect, plot and plan. Sometimes I solve problems or work out talks whilst I run, other days I follow a training plan,…
It’s been interesting to reflect on the year in Learning Technology (previous post) and that has brought about the realisation that much of what I have done this year has been in open practice and collaboration (and all the better for it!). It’s also brought about another blog post… 🙂 Some of the work has been around governance and policy, for example in collaboration with Lorna Campbell, Martin Weller and Joe Wilson we produced a…
Against a backdrop of much political, social and environmental upheaval I have spent the past year working hard for all things Learning Technology – always on a mission to make better sense of how we relate to technology as we learn, teach and live. Learning Technology is so interesting and challenging because the work we do is happening at the intersection of education and work, constantly negotiating our relationship with technology as a society, as…
This post continues the series on openly sharing our approach to leading a virtual team – a joint project with Martin Hawksey (cross-posted here) for which we write a monthly blog post. November This month we discuss checklists, how each of our staff invented their own scale to rate their week and treating others with kindness. Maren: I’ve been thinking about how to make time for both urgent and important things, and at the same…