- Reflection: Volunteering as a mentor
For the last few years I’ve volunteered as a mentor with the One Million Mentor programme: 1MM mentoring empowers young people to become the best version of themselves: building relationships -free of assumption and judgement – where they benefit from another’s experience and perspective and can think bigger, find their own answers and take the next meaningful step into their future. We recruit, train and deploy volunteer mentors, matching them with mentees, providing high quality… - Free resource: Coaching Walk
Over the past year I have deepened my executive coaching practice to include walk’n’coach sessions. In order to give clients a taste of how this practice could work I’ve created an online resource, which is free to try. What is it? The idea for this format comes from my own experience of having wonderful reflective conversations with my then mentor Margaret as we walked our way through parks discussing strategy and solving the knotty problems… - Healthy Habits: from Analogue to AI
Over the summer I have updated my coaching course for leaders and managers, ready for the next academic year. I designed the course originally just over 18 months ago, and three cohorts later I have learnt a lot about what participants find most valuable. I’ve also had a lot of experiences working with coaching clients who are tasked with introducing AI in their teams, or supporting colleagues who are now using productivity suites such as… - Podcast chat reclaimed!
For the past two months my podcast has been enjoying a well deserved summer break! It’s been good to take a step back from the busy grind of producing the episodes. It’s work I love, but with so much else already going on this summer, it was necessary to pause. Regular listeners look out for the summer special, the first new episode since June, which is out next week! Fortunately for me, edtech’s extraordinary (and… - Botanical adventures, analogue escape.
This summer has come with lots of time outdoors, gardening, looking after plants and going to visit some nearby gardens, like the one featured in this blog post at Dyffryn gardens. I have been craving time away from the screen, and spending time outdoors, walking through the woods with the dogs and pottering about in the garden has been just what the doctor’s ordered. Somehow the louder the clamour of digital productivity becomes, the less… - Podcast gems
The first half of the year has been so busy that it’s taken until now for me to revisit podcast interviews, and I’ve found some real gems along the way. One of my favourite interviews to record was this conversation with Marcela and Igor: I loved learning more about a co-leadership model they use to run their organisation and how they approach open leadership. It was especially interesting to hear about sharing documents and folders,… - Digital Productivity, Revisited.
As part of a Masterclass webinar hosted by the Digital Learning Institute, I am returning to my work on digital productivity. Specifically, digital productivity for leaders in the AI-enabled workplace. It’s an interesting time to think about this topic. The conversation about AI tools and platforms is all about increasing productivity, doing more, faster… with less. But from a leadership perspective, I feel its less about practical productivity hacks and more about exercising judgment. Knowing… - Conferencing at the cutting edge
Organising conferences is my guilty professional pleasure… . I fell into doing it at various times throughout my career and I thoroughly enjoy it. I like the preparations, the run up and the excitement of delivering an event, whether it’s for several hundred people in a hushed auditorium or a buzzy online crowd with run-away chatter and endless DMs. Last year I had an absolute blast working on the DS106 Summer Camp with Jim Groom… - Prolific pen pal
Being a pen pal was something I got into as a child. In my family it was usual to send postcards from our camping holidays in Greece or Spain to family and friends in Germany. I made friends on these holidays, often from other countries, and as we exchanged tearful goodbyes at the end of each summer, addresses were swapped and letter writing commenced. I had a good pen pal in Luxembourg for a long… - Wake up and smell the roses
Last night I dreamt about AI and roses, and in my dream I was blogging, so here I am, trying to capture the thoughts I had during the night. Thanks to Joe Murphy and Tom Witherspoon, whose inspiring chat at yesterday’s Blogging Community of Practice meeting truly inspired me, I am here pressing publish on a draft, saving the world one half baked idea at a time. What’s happening in the title of this blog… - Finishing another year at Oxford
This week wraps up another year of teaching at the University of Oxford. Summer is here, and my work with the Digital Capabilities team takes a break over the summer, before Michaelmas Term starts again in autumn. For the first time since I started this year had more in person components, including two days of fully in person sessions with cohorts from across the university. Getting to work with such a diverse range of people… - Critical Digital Capabilities for Leaders in Hybrid Higher Education
I recently took part in a leadership development programme, Leadership in Higher Education and Artificial Intelligence: A New Paradigm. The programme was designed with an international cohort in mind, and it was great fun to work with leaders from across different countries and from a whole range of Higher Education institutions. My session was inspired by Global Trends Towards Flexible, Hybrid Working and its Impact for Digital Leadership in Higher Education, a report commissioned by…