Maren Deepwell

Author: Maren Deepwell

  • What happens to our senses in the hybrid workplace?

    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 blog posts on his website, it looks like David Abram’s thinking has evolved much since then, and he is now a visiting Senior Visiting Scholar in Ecology and Natural Philosophy at Harvard University. Lots of fascinting things to dig into if you’re interested in these topics. Meanwhile my interest in this topic has also evolved, from thinking about human beings and the material world and landscape to human beings in the workplace, specifically in the increasingly hybrid workplace.

    Which brings me to considering what happens to our senses when we work in a hybrid or fully remote setting for long periods. How does our embodied experience of work change as we spend more time in front of screens, alone in our studies or on kitchen chairs? And also, how does our perception of work shift as our senses of sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing adjust to hybrid working?

    I am curious to start exploring some aspects of this and how our embodied experience of hybrid working may influence of sense of wellbeing.

    Sight

    The sense I read the most about in the context of hybrid working, digital wellness and technology is sight. Given the amount of time spent in front of screens, scrolling, staring and not blinking, implementing screen time limits or wearing blue-light-blocking glasses to alleviate eyestrain is becoming more common. Mobile phones now offer a different light mode closer to bedtime and monitor screen time in order to alert us when levels increase, and smart watches can remind you to move a little every hour. Other tips include taking a break from the screen, going outside to adjust to daylight, look into the distance or look at something green/natural to help your eyes relax and recover. The traditional 5-10 minutes of screen breaks every hour is part of every Display Screen Equipment safety training I have come across.

    Hybrid working typically provides fewer distractions and more reliance on online interaction for communication and collaboration, making it less likely that regular screen breaks are taken. Even when we step away from the screen, notifications and messages on mobile devices usually stay switched on, making it more likely that we end up with more screen time.

    Hybrid working has also led to more hybrid and online meetings. Depending on the role you work in, you probably find meeting free hours have become more rare and back-to-back video calls more common. Zoom fatigue impact us beyond our sense of sight alone, this article in Medial News Today summarises how “headaches, migraines, eye irritation and pain, blurred and double vision, excessive tearing and blinking are the most common and immediately visible physical symptoms of Zoom fatigue”.

    This week, how many times have you taken a 5-10 minute break every hour? For me, I would estimate I take a short break for each hour less than half of the time. On busy days maybe 10-20% of the time, but generally somewhere around 30-40% of the time.

    Healthy habit: step away from the screen

    If you are looking to improve your digital wellness by taking more regular screen breaks, here are some tips to get started:

    • What is your starting point? To begin with, reflect on how regularly you step away from the screen for a short break at the moment. If you are spending 8 hours a day in back-to-back video calls, then even one or two breaks a day might seem like a stretch. If you are already taking a break at lunch or making tea mid-morning, building in a few extra breaks might feel more achievable. Be honest with yourself about where you are starting from so that you can set yourself an achievable goal.
    • Easy does it. No matter where you are starting from, find the least busy time of your working day or week. It might be Friday afternoon or Monday evening. It might be the hour after lunch when there’re fewer meetings. Whenever it is, focus on that time first and plan in an extra break.
      You can use your calendar, phone reminders, post-it notes or whatever else will help you remember to take a break.
      Then, when the time comes, step away from your screen and do something that is not screen related for 5 minutes.
      I often go downstairs to get some water, water my plants or make a hot drink. If the weather is nice I might step outside. It doesn’t matter what you do.
      As you get up and start to move, notice how you feel. Are you stiff? Is there any part of you (or all parts…) that feel tense?
      Get back to work after 5-10 minutes.
    • Make it a habit: you might decide to set yourself a goal to take an extra break every day or a number of breaks a week to begin with. Observe any physical symptoms of taking regular breaks away from the screen or how your mood changes. If you have a busy day or a busy week and you end up forgetting to step away from the screen or you don’t have time, just get back to it when you can. The overall aim is to get into the habit of having breaks, and even one additional break is better than none.
    • Share your habit: one of the best ways to make this habit stick is to share and normalise stepping away from the screen. If you use direct messages or chat at work, post a quick update like “Just stepping away from the screen for a break” or “Back online in 10 minutes. Taking a screen break”. It’s a powerful way to promote digital wellbeing in any workplace, and if you happen to lead people or projects, your example can help others, too.

    In the next post in this series I’ll be focusing on a different aspect of embodied hybrid working and share a new healthy habit to try out.

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    Image credit: Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

  • All things open, all things fun!

    All things open, all things fun!

    This week is Open Education Week and I am super excited to join in the fun, celebrating all things open in education. If you want to catch me live, I am joining a whole host of special guests on air hosted by the one and only Alan Levine on Wednesday:

    P.S. It was a lot of fun to join Alan online, and here is a screenshot of a moment that made me smile: all of us talking about online, digital, AI and so forth, surrounded by books.

    Open practice is central to all the work I do and for the past ten years my interest in and commitment to open has only increased. So it’s been a special pleasure to take part in a series of conversations in the run up to this week:

    Building Community with guest Martin Hawksey!, Reclaim TV, 9th February 2024 was the first of these. I was lucky to join my Reclaim colleagues Amanda and Taylor and our special guest Martin Hawksey, who for me is both a friend and long-term collaborator. Community building is really at the heart of open practice for me, and we chatted about how to engage with people, how to reach new communities and networks, the impact of the pandemic and the changes in the social media landscape. Martin has more experience in this space than most, having built, curated and supported communities from the local to the global scale over the past fifteen years or more. There is little he isn’t expert in when it comes to making technology serve communities, and in this session he shares some of his reflections as well as tips 🙂

    Building on that conversation, Reclaim & OER #4Ever, with Meredith Huffman, Reclaim TV, 16 February 2024 took the community building one step further as we previewed a talk we are planning for OER24. The theme of the talk is putting community together with capabilities and CPD, sharing approaches for gaining skills and expertise in open educational technology. Plus, we share a lot of fun memories of what we got up to at open education conferences over the years.. (friendly warning: shoe tweets are mentioned in this episode). I love how Meredith explains how building on hosting and infrastructure the community piece can help empower staff to have a better relationship with tools and technology which benefits not only the institution, but students as well. I can’t wait for OER24!

    For me the conversation that brought all the elements together was Using Open Source tools as key infrastructure, with Anne-Marie Scott, Reclaim TV, 1 March 2024. This is the one where we talk big picture, global policy and institutional change. I love listening to Anne-Marie share her rich, reflective perspective and admire her ability to explain even the most complex dynamic in open source and open tech with such clarity, that you always leave inspired and empowered in equal measure.

    And to add another piece of blogging goodness, I have shared a bit more over on the Reclaim blog.

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    Image credit: CC-BY Bryan M Mathers

  • 5 months into re-inventing Mondays

    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 passed. Got back at quarter past nine, and shortly afterwards I was on the treadmill, for my first full 30 min run in a long time.

    I got to my desk with coffee around half ten, after a shower and some household bits. Posey lay next to me, napping happily after her walk. We had some admin to tackle for a few hours, and got a lot of things sorted.

    After lunch and a break, I spent the afternoon working on a project and reports, then I had an hour’s session with a fellow coach in the US, some more emails and… that was the end of my very peaceful Monday.

    Not everyday is like today, and I am glad that there is both more excitement and more interaction with colleagues on a regular basis. Despite enjoying a slower day and the opportunity to spend more time outside or exercising, I wouldn’t like this level of quietude on its own. As part of a mix of days however, it is just what I was hoping for when I started this new phase of my career.

    At the end of this month I’ll be hitting the six months milestone and there are a whole host of things that I have learnt along the way. Bills have been paid, projects have been completed, certificates have been gained and time has passed. I needed time to move on, to help me change my mindset from where I was last summer, and as we move into a new season I notice how much things have shifted for me. I have processed and reflected on how I got to where I am, and now I am on the cusp of writing a new chapter.

    With spring and summer on the horizon, the new path I am taking is starting to feel a little less unfamiliar and there are some things that I am beginning to have longer term hopes for. Projects and people I am getting attached to, and organisations I particularly enjoy working with.

    I am also discovering a less lonely way of working in a number of contexts. In my role as a CEO I often felt isolated and lonely. At the start when I first became a CEO, I found being everyone’s boss hard to get comfortable with and being in charge of decisions meant that plenty of people wanted my ear to convince me of their perspective. Representing a membership body was a huge privilege, and yet for me it also brought with it a lot of scrutiny from a range of stakeholders. It sometimes felt a bit like having lots of Line Managers and never being able to please them all.

    Even when you have a lot of great people to collaborate with (and I often did!), there are plenty of worries and tasks that ultimately stay with you when you run an organisation and the buck stops with you. This is particularly true of a small one, in which you don’t have a big senior team or many directors to delegate to or consult with.

    Moving to my current role, I no longer have that sense of being isolated. At the moment, I have a few projects where collaboration is happening, where partnerships are starting to form, and I am enjoying it immensely. Writing things together, figuring out solutions to problems, creating or organising activities and events… it’s refreshing for me not to always be in charge and instead have opportunities to collaborate on an equal footing, or indeed report to a client. It’s nice not to feel solely responsible for everything all of the time. It’s more than nice. It’s a huge relief.

    Unsurprisingly, in the last few months, I have also found that when I need to step up and take responsibility, I have relished it. In my executive role I developed skills and capabilities that come in very useful indeed when a decision has to be taken or a crisis managed. I wasn’t quite sure whether dipping back into that aspect of leadership would feel like a burden, but it hasn’t. It’s felt interesting to see possibilities for taking on leadership responsibilities in a new way, different from how I would have operated in my previous organisation.

    This is a really good example of why I wanted to have a change. This opportunity to reinvent myself a bit, to learn about myself and what I enjoy doing in new contexts, with new people and new organisations, feels so valuable. Fifteen years in one organisation meant that I grew up as a professional in only one context and I couldn’t think myself out of that perspective. Now that I have a change of scene, things look different indeed.

    In these posts I have written frequently about uncertainty, and how the precariousness of starting over on a free-lance basis worries me at times. And despite the fact that these past few months have gone very well, that worry continues and it surfaces in unexpected ways. What I am learning as the months progress (and what for me sits on the other side of the uncertainty equation), is that the stories I tell myself, the habits I can’t break and the ones I don’t manage to make stick are not related to any particular role, but they come with me. Both good and bad.

    This is where the collaboration + community angle comes in again. People around me, colleagues I am working with, are helping me to be accountable to take those breaks, to not work or think about work 24/7, and to get better at sharing how I am doing and what I am interested in. And so, I am re-discovering, reclaiming, the joy of what I am good at, what I can make happen and what I love doing.

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    Image credit: CC-BY Maren Deepwell. Sker Beach on the only blue sky day since early January.

  • Non-fiction reading for March

    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 how their evolving priorities impact on our lives.

    Other articles I read this month:

    One of the books I read recently is Lol Tolhurst’s Goth – A History. Lots of anecdotes and archive pictures from the late 70s and early 80s made this a treasure trove for fans of The Cure and their contemporaries. It reads more like a memoir than a history to me, but I found plenty of things I enjoyed.

    On my radar for this month

    Work’s been so busy at the moment that I have been mainlining fiction in recent weeks, and I am grateful indeed to have a great local library system here in Cardiff, so that I can borrow old Discworld novels to my hearts content.

    Non-fiction reading 2024

    Creativity and culture

    • Art Matters by Neil Gaiman and Chris Riddell
    • Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

    Hybrid working and leadership

    • Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
    • Rooms of Their Own (Where Great Writers Write), Improbable Libraries and Shedworking, all three by Alex Johnson
    • Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career by Herminia Ibarra

    Coaching and reflective inquiry

    • The Big Book of Beautiful Questions by Warren Berger
    • Coach the Person not the Problem by Marcia Reynolds

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  • Reclaiming #Edtech4life in Open Education (at OER24)

    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 Jim Groom. Here’s what we are planning to speak about:

    How do you make innovation work when the day job as an (edtech) educator gets ever busier? Where do you find not only solutions to practical problems but someone who speaks your language? When your day job is largely edtech focused and your focus is in practice, not policy or research, it can be challenging to find communities of practice that advocate for open – open in the sense of software and licensing, but also open in the sense that the community is welcoming, open to new ideas, and open to change. 

    Over the past 10 years our organisation has built a growing community of practice on the back of our day to day business activities. Yes, we are a small commercial company, but we bring a lot of expertise of working in Higher Ed to the table and we walk the walk of open education. 

    In this presentation we’ll share practical approaches inspired by communities like Equity Unbound and the ALT Open Education Special Interest Group  to connect with educators and edtechs from across the US and internationally sharing practice via community chats, micro courses, live streams and radio shows. We’ll share lessons learnt from running a hub for professional development every day of the year, a place in which open educators can engage in anything from trouble-shooting wordpress installations to tinkering with next generation tools. We offer a safe space to explore with peers, to play, to fail and make new connections along the way.   

    Resources and references

    Road to OER24

    Last week Meredith and I did a community stream all about our prep for the conference as well as sharing lots of the love we have for the event, memories from previous years and giving a bit of a preview of what we hope to speak about.

    You can watch the recording below, and join us on the road to OER24! See you there 🙂

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  • A milestone moment on my coaching journey

    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 that my clients can be confident that my coaching adheres to the ethical and professional standards of the the International Coaching Federation. And, to help with clarity, the International Coaching Federation defines coaching as “partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximise their personal and professional potential. The process of coaching often unlocks previously untapped sources of imagination, productivity and leadership”.

    Before I started the coaching training process I already had experience in mentoring and coaching on an informal basis, and I continue to be active in mentoring, for example as part of the 1MM programme for young adults, but the training process really helped me understand the professional dimension of coaching as a practice.

    Learning a new skill and developing in an emerging professional practice was a challenge. The training programme I chose to join is US-based, and thus a lot of my training happened in the evenings especially at weekends, and for months at a time, every Saturday or Sunday evening would be spent together with a cohort of inspiring new coaches with whom I built great relationships. Katie’s approach to coach training provided just the right mix of support, aspiration and stretch goals and I especially appreciated the focus on coaching in Higher Ed.

    Being new at something was a valuable experience for me. When you are practicing coaching, making mistakes and reflecting on your practice together you are in a vulnerable position and it took quite some time for me to develop confidence in my own judgement when it comes to coaching.

    What I love about coaching is that moment when it opens up a new insight or leads to a decision or an action. Sometimes it takes a long time to get to a moment like this, and being part of that journey is a privilege. No matter how long or short a coaching engagement, I always feel that the journey is rewarding.

    Initially I was focused on using coaching approaches within an executive role, and at the moment I use coaching in most of the work I do in different ways. It’s a valuable skills to have in all sorts of contexts, and it makes me better at being in a leadership role.

    I coach individuals and teams, within Higher Ed and outside of education, and I am on a journey to finding my niche, which in coaching terms means that you are trying to find what or who is the best fit for a coaching relationship, a match where it feels easy and productive and where you can make the biggest difference. Thus gaining experience coaching in different contexts and with a range of clients is especially valuable to me at this stage, as I am trying to learn about where my strengths as a coach lie.

    Coaching is a fantastic tool that I hope more people, particularly those of us who are juggling a lot whilst also achieving a lot, will make use of. That’s why I’ll continue to offer 10% of my coaching sessions on a pro bono basis.

    I am very grateful to all of my teachers, training colleagues, fellow coaches and most of all my clients for an amazing two years of developing as a coach. Thank you!

    Here’s to the next hundred hours of coaching together!

    Thank you

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