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Maren Deepwell Posts

OER24: The sound of Open Practice in social media wilderness

I am REALLY looking forward to OER24 this year, not least of all because I get to share the stage with Martin as we present out (first ever) short talk on podcasts and radio. If you are curious what we’ll be talking about, you are in the right place: Read a short summary of our talk How do you share open practice and foster innovation in Open Education in the age of social media fragmentation?…

Finding my podcast voice

It’s been 18 months since I first launched my podcast, and this academic year I have stepped up the pace with a new episode every week. 65 episodes later… I still enjoy the process of making the podcast and it’s been very, very useful for my professional practice. It’s also a (for me still relatively) new way to sharing my work and I have tried to find the right tone in this medium, tried to…

What happens to our senses in the hybrid workplace?

When I was a research student I came across David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World, an ecological philosophy book. At the time, I was deeply interested in phenomenology, and as part of my research in Anthropology I was learning much about how human beings relate to and experience the world. Specifically how we relate to the world through our senses as embodied beings. From the articles and…

5 months into re-inventing Mondays

Here is a snap-shot of today, 5 months into re-inventing Mondays: This morning, a Monday morning, I woke up around half six. I got up, we had tea and the dogs had their breakfast. Around 8am I headed out with the dogs and for a change it wasn’t raining. We did a 5km route, down the river and back again. Not many people were out, but we said hello to the runners and cyclists we…

Non-fiction reading for March

Newsletters have become more important to my regular reading, and alongside those of Audrey Watters’ Second Breakfast (on technology and fitness) and Helen Beetham’s Imperfect Offerings (on education, technology and AI), I find John Naughton’s Memex a very valuable source of inspiration and further reading. One of the links I followed from Memex was Cory Doctorow’s McLuhan lecture on enshittification. It makes for very interesting and insightful reading, analysing our relationship with tech platforms and…

Reclaiming #Edtech4life in Open Education (at OER24)

In a month today, I’ll be at the OER Conference in Cork, and I am really looking forward to it! I am huge fan of this event, and encourage you to have a look at the programme and register if you haven’t yet done so and are planning to come. This year I am co-presenting two short sessions, starting with Reclaiming #Edtech4life in Open Education which is a joint venture with Meredith (Fierro) Huffman and…

A milestone moment on my coaching journey

This month I am celebrating a big milestone moment on my coaching journey. After two years of training and 100+ hours of coaching with over 20 clients I am set to formally complete the ACC credential of the International Coaching Federation (ICF). Thanks to Katie Linder’s Higher Ed Coach Training, I have now completed all mandatory training to become an ICF Associate Certified Coach. Completing the training and gaining the requisite experience in formal coaching hours means…

Digital Wellbeing and Hybrid Working

This month I am running a short course on Digital Wellbeing and Hybrid Working. Working with the wonderful team at the University of Oxford IT Learning Centre is a rewarding experience, and with the support of Emma Procter-Legg, their Digital Skills Service Manager, the whole process has been seamless from start to finish 🙂 It’s been a welcome creative challenge to translate insights from leading virtual teams and hybrid working into the context of digital…

4 months into re-inventing Mondays

Time has flown by. It feels like only a moment ago that I was blogging about being 3 months into my career transition… and here we are, having passed the four month mark. Looking back at my previous posts on this topic has inspired me to share some updates about how things are going, how much my efforts to re-invent Mondays are bearing fruit and how free-lance life is treating me. In case you missed…