I love being online, and I love the communities I am part of online. As someone who relies largely on the internet to sustain long distance relationships with family and friends as well as collaborating with work colleagues on a daily basis, I am very invested in my corners of the web.
It takes a lot of effort however to keep those spaces good spaces to be in, on platforms like Discord and Mastodon, as well as this blog – my own domain for the past twenty years. In one of my favourite blog posts of the year, my partner Martin Weller reflected on the fragmentation of social media landscape to the tune of 70s disco tracks.
For me, the ‘secret sauce’ that keeps the network I am in truly fun, inspiring and genuine is the work happening in and around open education. From the OER Conference to working across various Open Education initiatives and group publications like this one from earlier in the year (Openness in Education as a Praxis: From Individual Testimonials to Collective Voices). For me, for the past 10+ years that usually involves the folk from Reclaim Hosting, the people who help you (and your students) get – and keep – a domain of one’s own. Incidentally, I have been digging into the archives and came across this gem of a post, from 2014, in which Jim Groom recounts how:
…we are still hoping to team up with Audrey Watters and Kin Lane to start realizing the vision behind “Reclaim Your Domain” as an extension of the Reclaim Hosting environment. Not just commodity hosting, but a space to synch, archive, and own your social presence around the web, while at the same time developing crucial web literacy skills.
Domains have been reclaimed, and ten years into the making there is no sign of letting up – Reclaim is thriving through technology as well as community. The community bit is the part I am especially excited about, and getting to work with the team that makes a packed calendar of events happen is a privilege as well as a lot of fun.
So this month, as we near the end of 2023, there is a whole host of activities to get involved in, as well as a very special session of festive karaoke, which is happening on December 22nd!
You’ll be able to watch the show on Reclaim.TV or listen in on Reclaim Radio… and if you let us know that you’d like to join us, then you can sing your festive favourites to your hearts content.
Me, I live in fear of karaoke, and unfortunately there’s a lot of evidence of how true those feelings are on YouTube. However, there must be a song by The Cure that I can co-opt as “festive”, and I am really looking forward to joining in, and reclaiming a bit of online fun before I head off into the holidays.
A year ago my book Leading Virtual Teams was published, and I can very clearly remember all the wonderful excitement that led up to the launch, and am still grateful for all the encouragement for this Open Access publication.
A year on, and the book, which was initially inspired by the work Martin Hawksey and I did at ALT, has turned into a whole host of resources, two free courses and a podcast which informs my wider work on hybrid working leadership development and coaching.
A year in Leading Virtual Teams
To celebrate the milestone, this post gives a quick overview over what’s happened in 2023 and if you are just discovering the book or my work, this is a great place to start:
Open Access publication – December 2022
Leading Virtual Teams – Field Notes from a CEO by Dr Maren Deepwell, was published in December 2022 as an open access publication by the Association for Learning Technology, UK. You can read and download a free digital edition, published as an Open Access publication by ALT in partnership with Open Academia.
I started the podcast in 2022, but in spring 2023 things really started happening. Each week, I share ideas and strategies for creative and fun approaches to help you succeed and lead in the hybrid workplace. Each episode includes tools, resources and strategies for different aspects of hybrid working, and links to blog posts and further reading.
Podcast | Blog post | Part 4: Fostering a shared team culture (12 May ’23)
Podcast | Blog post | Part 5: Leading team activities (19 May ’23)
Podcast season 3 with weekly episodes – September 2023
In September I was excited to have Season 3 of the Leading Virtual Teams Podcast finally underway. It’s a new season in every sense… and that is why I kicked off with ‘new pencil case’ moments in episode.
This episode celebrated the start of September, and the new season or start of term for many of us. I have recently tried out a new gratitude journal share ideas for how to find bright spots in a busy time of year. I also give you a preview of what’s in store for season 3 and the upcoming run of the Leading Virtual Teams course in October.
Free Hybrid Working Habits course launches – October 2023
I have experienced a lot of ups and downs working from home, managing remote workers and collaborating virtually, and I chronicled this in my book, Leading Virtual Teams (2022). One of the things I learnt along the way is that a good work/life balance and relationship with digital technology may look a little different for everyone but that the journey how we get there is similar. That’s why I designed this course: to share practical tips that you can use to find ways to make hybrid working really work for you (or you team or organisation) in the long term.
It’s been great to see the course attract lots of listens and interaction. Although I do encourage people to register for free, only about half of the people participating in the course do. Others prefer to simply subscribe to the podcast to listen along and explore at their own pace.
The topics for the course resonated well with participants, especially those designed to help manage digital overwhelm and setting life/work boundaries. Plus, I really enjoyed recording these as well, which is an added bonus!
The course resources and podcasts are now freely available and you can explore topics at your own pace. The easiest way to do that is to listen to the course podcast:
It’s been a wonderful year, and it’s also been a lot of hard work. Practically all my work in this area since the publication of the book has happened around the edges of my day job, and especially until the end of September that was a very full on commitment. Since focusing full time on my free-lance work I have had a little more scope to take on paid work in this space, and thus give this topic a bit more time in my day to day work.
Every now and then I get an email or a message or someone speaks to me at a conference about something valuable they found in the book, something that helped them in their work or opened up a new perspective and it always, always makes my day.
I have chosen not to publish the book commercially, instead going the Open Access route with the book and all the resources and courses I have published since, because I want as many people as possible to learn from the mistakes I made and the experiences I recount, and find a better way to manage blended, hybrid and virtual organisations. One downside is however that I have not much data about how many people engage with the work I do, and with an ever more fragmented social media landscape getting a feel for one’s reach is more challenging still. Which is why I value it so much when folk do share some feedback or send me a message.
All in all, it’s been a fun and rewarding year working towards putting the book into practice and making the ideas in it available to a larger audience.
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This week I am joining the university in Oxford online for a lunchtime digital skills development session. I am really looking forward to this talk, partly because the topic is a lot of fun and also because I love the format: it’s opt-in, open to all and informal, hence it (hopefully) attracts the kind of folk who are already interested in the topic or need some help. Whatever the case, it’s a win to have an engaged audience.
The talk is structured as a pick and mix offering, in which I share different strategies, resources and tips about hybrid working. I have included ideas for individuals to check in with their personal set up, starting with their workspace. I also include activities teams or groups could try out and share some experiences of how these work in practice and why they are valuable. To prompt deeper reflection, the session also has a some elements that support you to think through your relationship with the way you work, technology and what work means to you.
I have recorded a special podcast episode in which I deliver parts of the talk and you can also look at the slides which include all the links and references on the final page.
Maren: Hi Martin! Been a while since we last blogged about leading virtual teams and hybrid working. So… I have lots of questions to get us started: tell us a bit about what your current work set up is like, and what you are particularly interested in when it comes to all things virtual/hybrid working.
Also, I am curious to hear how you think things have changed since the dark days of lockdown working. I have been doing some research into the data around home-working and evolving policies here in the UK (for example this 2023 report and the flexible working bill and this WIRED article provides a helpful insight into what’s not being tackled). What’s your take on the evolving picture of hybrid working?
Martin: Hi Maren, thanks for having me back! For just over the last year I’ve been working for a UK based Google Partner. We have offices in Manchester, Edinburgh and Utrecht, but the focus is very much on remote working. Even in a post pandemic world I see many businesses still trying to find the right fit around hybrid culture. One of the key challenges I see is how to replicate the benefits of being co-located when employees are hundreds of miles apart. For now let’s put these benefits in the broad bucket of ‘watercooler moments’, ad-hoc opportunities for social interaction as well as work discussions. Seemingly effortless and tricky to measure the benefit. It’s something I remember us talking a lot about and I know you’ve shared a number of approaches and strategies which can help. Where I work a recent internal ‘pulse’ survey has highlighted a desire for increased opportunities to work collaboratively. The business is exploring various approaches, including one of the skeuomorphic virtual office spaces, Kumospace. This pilot highlighted there could be real benefits in restructuring the way teams work, a virtual focal point with awareness mechanisms like location, icons, and camera status making it easier to immediately speak to someone if they are available. The challenge was the price point. It was interesting to read the surveys you highlighted which include data on the overall economic benefit of hybrid working. Whilst we had many anecdotal examples of conversations that unblocked issues or identified business opportunities it is hard to put a value on them. The other challenge was there was low engagement across the business in the pilot space. So while we could see benefits for our team, but possible to justify for the business. Does this example resonate with what you’ve seen? Do you get a sense that organisations are still trying to work out how to make hybrid working work?
Maren: It’s clear that businesses are still on a learning curve when it comes to hybrid working long-term. In the media, there is a lot of debate on whether or not there’ll be a big return to the office, but I think recruitment and retention without a flexible offering will be so challenging, that organisations won’t have a choice. There are a lot of parallels between the use of technology in education and training, and the use of technology in the workplace. Similar to how student expectations have shifted when it comes to digital, so have employee expectations, too. Organisations who don’t offer flexibility or effective hybrid working won’t be able to recruit or retain the diverse talent they need without entrenching structural inequalities further, for example disadvantage employees with care responsibilities. A few years ago we talked about the effort it takes to create and sustain employee engagement online, and your experience with the skeuomorphic virtual office space really chimes with me. Anecdotally it feels like ‘everyone’ wants more connection and collaboration, but at the same time they’d like that sense of connectedness to be maintained by others, so that they can dip in and out as they wish. Even something as simple as internal chat channels require a lot of effort to maintain. If you are using something like Slack or Mattermost to coordinate customer support tickets, then every support ticket becomes a reason to engage (and the value proposition is clear). However if you are in a water cooler or social space there is usually no external prompt to engage and someone usually has to take responsibility for kick-starting engagement by posting something. What are your thoughts on this?
Martin: The term ‘effort’ resonates with me. Internally in our department we’ve switched to using an all day Google Meet with breakouts for individual teams. In a recent conversation with a colleague about using this space effectively we talked about how it takes effort to join the virtual office, similar to the effort it would take to get to a physical office. I would also agree it requires someone taking responsibility for the use of virtual spaces. I would go even further and say it requires leadership. Similar to having an office manager it needs someone to take responsibility for monitoring and supporting the online office. Something I remember us discussing previously was effort in terms of cognitive load. Part of this is the brain doing overtime trying to analyze micro movements in facial expressions. Looking towards the future I think this could get a lot easier with the next generation video conferencing hardware. I recently had the pleasure to have a short demonstration of Google’s Starline immersive conferencing solution. This combines technology that can scan a face in 3D, and present this to the viewer maintaining a depth of field without the need of special glasses or headsets. The result is incredibly impressive. It was only a brief experience so I can’t talk to the long term effects. Two things I did learn was that maintaining a realistic 1:1 scale was important, so it’s unlikely we’ll see this technology on smaller screens. The other detail was for this solution they are focusing on capturing and displaying detail in the face. For example, when the person on the call held up an apple there was a strong 3D effect, but I could see some fragmentation in the detail between the apple and the person’s fingers. Still lots of unknowns with this type of technology including whether it will ever be affordable for the masses, but interesting times!
Maren: It’s really interesting to look out how technology might shape things in the future and what sort of skills and capabilities folk may need to develop to effectively deploy more advanced solutions. One thing I have been thinking about a lot recently, and also a topic I covered in the hybrid working course I ran recently, is increasing productivity whilst stepping away from the screen. There are a lot of reasons why we are glued to our screens, but the longer I work in a hybrid or fully remote setting the more I realise that I need to design my days to be a lot less desk based in order to be at my most productive. From getting more movement in and giving my eyes a break, to finding new ways to connect and communicate without staring at a screen I am interested in how we can mix things up a little more.
Listen to the full conversation in the podcast 🙂
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Today is a big day! Together with colleagues from all across the UK, I am heading to London. It’s the Week of VocTech, and the annual showcase of everything that’s happening across the sector.
I feel fortunate to be continuing my work as Strategic Lead for the partnership between ALT and the Ufi VocTech Trust even though I stepped down as ALT’s CEO earlier this year. There’re a couple of reasons why: from a personal perspective, I love working in Vocational and Further Education because that’s where I took my first steps from alienated high school drop out to finding my way into further learning. Next, I love being part of a partnership where so much actively happens (and we have achieved much in the last few years). The biggest reason however is AmplifyFE. Yes, it’s a project, yes, it’s working in partnership, yes, there are awesome people involved, and it is also so much more than that: it’s a grassroots community of practice that is connecting the dots between individual practitioners, innovators and industry for the benefit of the learners furthest from opportunity. Since it’s launch in October 2020 (remember that time?) our community has grown to connect 2,700 practitioners.
Over the past twenty years I have worked with lots of projects that tried to achieve what we have done, and my bookmarks bar is a graveyard of moribund communities of practice in which tumbleweeds flourish. So what is the secret sauce of our success?
As we enter our fourth year, here are my reflections:
We connect, we don’t compete
When we first started setting up AmplifyFE, we were very clear that we were building a network of networks, not a new network. This distinction is key to our success: we don’t aim to replace or take over existing networks, we act as a meta network, an overarching connection that links one specialist group with another, one sector event with practitioners who don’t know where to start. We don’t wait for you to come to us. We try to find and come to you.
Part of our mission is to help those who are isolated within their institution or specialist subject, those EdTech or IT teams of one, to connect with people who speak their language and share their concerns.
We put everyone on the map
All of our artwork is created with Bryan Mathers via a Visual Thinkery process. Our community map was one of the first things we developed, and it was born out of a desire to show the communities and conversations that we already knew about and to allow others to (literally) put themselves on the map.
That’s a very powerful message to send. We say: put yourself on the map, and we will help others find you, join in and contribute. We want to map where the conversations about practice are really happening, no matter how informal or niche your interest. In a sector in which everyone is under pressure, short of funding and faced with mounting challenges, let’s connect you with the people who are in the same boat. We are not gatekeepers, we are map makers.
We reflect our community in our research and case studies
We also take a deeper diver into how learning technology and digital tools can be designed and deployed to support vocational learners most impacted by the ‘digital divide’. We explore what key advice can we give to those beginning or continuing an innovation journey in VocTech.
Our Insights Report shares fresh research and case studies that show what makes for truly successful co-creation between vocational educators and digital design project teams. We unpack how we can create effective learning solutions working in partnership with vocational learners to help narrow the ‘digital divide’ for those most in need of workplace skills development. Basically, we find practical examples that show what is the difference between what really works and what doesn’t deliver.
We learn from others
One of the phrases we think a lot about is ‘by the sector, for the sector’. I am always curious about what people mean when they say it. How much do you know about ‘the sector’ to begin with? How do you take part? How do you contribute? And what are you asking in return?
We work with a community that suffers greatly from the ever-changing policy and funding changes starting at top-level government policy, to sector bodies and then filtering down to the local level and to individual institutions. Excellent programmes are launched, and then disappear again 3 years later. Or funding is cut for frameworks and skills training that had been invested in for years.
From the outset, our work with AmplifyFE was designed to learn from that. We wanted to find the data that shows how much the constant changes impact on professional development and innovation. Since 2020 we have collected and analysed this data annually, and published the results in our sector audit.
It’s a fantastic piece of work that really shines a spotlight on the scale of change that Further and Vocational Education has to weather. We learn from that, and we aim to change that.
We use our funding to stay free and open
Thanks to the funding from the Ufi VocTech Trust and the partnership work between the trust and ALT, we benefit from three decades of expertise in how to run an independent community of practice and we can stay free and open to all practitioners to join.
And that brings me to the biggest lesson I learnt over the past three years:
We are here to stay
Building trust is key to our success. Our team (the fabulous Emma, Lynne, Chloe as well as Lou and also others) includes only people who really understand the sectors we serve, who have worked in Further and Vocational Education and often they still do. We are transparent about our aims and also what we won’t do (i.e. commercialise our community) .
Active communities of practice that grow are gold dust. We know from our sector audit how many communities disappear each year, either because no one is active or because of funding or policy changes. Or sometimes simply because a certain social network is taken over by madness. Remember the sector forums that suddenly closed? Or the demonstrator programme that stopped? Or the skills training that was cut? Well, we do, too. And that is why we are here to stay, actively supporting our community and amplifying what is happening across sectors as an independent network of network.
Over the past four weeks I have run a free and open course all about hybrid working. This week, we are wrapping up the course for 2023, and I’d like to take the opportunity to have a BIG thank you to everyone who took part, and contributed!
I love the format of the course, which is podcast cased with new topics released every week, as it allows folk to follow the course at their own pace, and offers the option to take part synchronously, too.
Inspiration for future courses
Quite a few people who registered for this run of the course expressed an interest in the weekly sessions to drop in. With between 30-50 participants taking part in the course each week, one of the challenges for me is to find a time that works across different time zones. For future runs of the course I’d probably come up with a better timetable to give more people the chance to connect and learn together.
Another element of the course that I am keen to develop is how new topics are released. Many people taking part have a lot of other commitments to juggle, and might find it easier if all the resources and topics were available from the start. I am going to have a think and see how that might work… 🙂
What worked well?
It’s been great to see the course attract lots of listens and interaction. Although I do encourage people to register for free, only about half of the people participating in the course do. Others prefer to simply subscribe to the podcast to listen along and explore at their own pace.
The topics for the course resonated well with participants, especially those designed to help manage digital overwhelm and setting life/work boundaries. Plus, I really enjoyed recording these as well, which is an added bonus!
Course catch up
The course resources and podcasts are now freely available and you can explore topics at your own pace. The easiest way to do that is to listen to the course podcast:
The course is podcast based and new episodes released weekly on Fridays. The podcast is called Leading Virtual Teams and you can find it on: Anchor, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Spotify.
If you’d rather see everything at a glance, the Course information page provides a handy guide to the course and links to all previous topics:
