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Tag: #Open

Plant pace… moving through change

Yep, this is another post about houseplants… or rather things we can learn from plants. I’ve previously published leadership lessons from office plants and in the same spirit this post is all about houseplant inspired tips for managing a period of change or transition. It’s inspired by my own experience of moving between jobs this month and my adventures in caring for a growing collecting of plants in my home and home office. It’s the…

What’s so important about open practice for hybrid leaders?

At the moment, a lot of my work is focused on the upcoming OER23 Conference. OER23 is the 14th annual conference for Open Education research, practice and policy is organised by ALT, the Association for Learning Technology, in partnership with UHI, the University of the Highlands and Islands. OER23 will bring together the strong Scottish Open Education movement and international participants to leverage our shared expertise for change in policy and practice. The conference will…

2022: My #FemEdTech Year

Early this year, I shared this post : This month a few of the long standing volunteers of our network are getting together to try and re-energise some elements of our community activities. Whilst much has happened over the past few years, activities like the curation of our twitter account and amplifying the posts tagged with the #femEdTech hashtag have been difficult to sustain. https://femedtech.net/published/care-and-curation-femedtech/ Since February then, each month for me started with #FemEdTech,…

Small celebrations

A month of sharing what matters. Last month I wrote a post about feeling frustrated with a sense of never achieving enough: I am embarking on a month of celebrating daily success: every day I am going to note a success and I am going to share it publicly to help hold myself accountable. It doesn’t matter to me how big or small a thing it is, from getting out of bed to finding five…

Virtual Teams Book: Trust & surveillance… extract from Chapter 3

In July, I drafted the first chapter of my book about leading virtual teams. Head over here to learn more about the project. Progress since the last post Since my last post, I have been working on Chapter 3. This includes some of the most interesting sections relating to Learning Technology and Open Education, in particular a section on open approaches to leadership. The chapter was harder to write because I had a lot of things I…

Virtual Teams – The Book Project

Welcome to the first post in the Virtual Teams Book series. Read on or find out more about this project. An introduction: From learning online to working online More and more organisations are moving to working remotely. It’s becoming commonplace in sectors like education to work from home as part of geographically distributed teams. As the number of managers and leaders leading virtual teams is increasing, everyone is looking to learn how to effectively manage…

Virtual Teams: When things get personal

Hello and welcome to this month’s post on leading a virtual team. In this post (cross-posted here) the two of us, that is Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey) and Maren Deepwell (@marendeepwell), continue our series of openly sharing our approach to leadership. If you are new here, you can catch up on earlier posts and podcasts or find out more about ALT, the organisation we work for as senior staff. We really appreciate comments & feedback and…

Blogging is my sketchbook: reflecting on the creative process and open practice

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…

Working with greater kindness: how to take a break from being the worst critic of your own professional practice.

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…