This month we are taking a break from sharing updates on the book other than the all important writing buddy pic.
An escalating shoulder injury has prompted a pause in writing as I need to focus on treatment & recovery.
Stay well and see you next month for hopefully more updates on the book đ
I like celebrating International Women’s Day. It reminds me each year that there is always more I can do. And each year, I try to do something along many of my professional colleagues and friends, to contribute to this overall effort.
This year, I am focusing my volunteer effort on the FemEdTech network as we are celebrating the launch of a special issue of the journal Learning, Media & Technology with the theme âFeminist perspectives on learning, media and educational technologyâ.
Learning, Media & Technology, Vol. 47, No. 1
https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cjem20/47/1
It’s a great publication from a group of insightful authors, and I encourage you to explore this rich set of papers whilst it remains freely available (fittingly so, during Open Education Week). Feminist + open = superpower.
Particularly in my context, in educational technology, these voices are now needed. We need them because our sector is growing faster, expanding and scaling up fuelled by the events of the past two years.
Gender equality is not often at the top of the agenda and this year it may feel like there are too many other crisis which take priority. Each year, this day reminds me that no matter what else is happening in the world, there are things I can do, as a CEO, as an employer, a leader, an author, a collaborator, a coach, a colleague, a friend, a partner, a daughter… that I can do as a woman, to make a difference.
And so I do. What I can.
Find out more https://www.internationalwomensday.com/ .
In January I officially started my coach training in order to become an accredited coach, an ICF Associate Certified Coach, via Katie Linderâs Higher Ed Coach Training.
We are now in Week 7 of the course and I am thoroughly enjoying it. I have learnt a lot in the first few weeks of the training, met some amazing people and started to develop a whole range of skills. It’s been a very motivating part of my practice and I find myself looking forward to each Saturday night’s session.
Whilst the training is very comprehensive, the hours required fit well around my existing commitments, and I have been listening to readings on walks in the evening and at weekends.
Along the way, I have set up a summary page about the work I am doing, and as my first pro-bono clients start coming on board, I have started to share coaching information and resources .
One of the things I have found the most interesting so far, is adopting a new mindset – a mindset that is focused very much on whomever I am working with. It’s fascinating to focus on not knowing the answers, but to be curious about what we might discover together.
Curiosity is something I value highly and it’s an element of coaching that I find suits me very well. I like asking questions, and I always try to keep an open mind about what might be at the end of a thought process or a conversation, and the coach training helps me develop a new way of doing that.
Initially I was expecting it to be challenging not to give advice or offer answers because that is often what my work requires of me day to day. But I haven’t found it to be a problem at all, quite the reverse. Focusing on my clients priorities has helped me adopt a new, a coaching mindset.
One idea I have had that is inspired by my previous experiences of walking line management meetings is to offer established clients I work with sessions that enable us to walk and talk. Here is what I have in mind:
Sometimes a video call is not the best environment to get us thinking, so for established clients I offer coaching sessions whilst we walk. Usually, this would be coaching via a phone call, but if you are based locally, we could also meet in person. Walking coaching sessions are particularly suited to think together about difficult situations or to reflect on a particular problem or idea.
This week I celebrate ten years as a CEO. I can’t quite believe that it’s been a decade since my appointment as a Chief Executive. My predecessor had served a similar term and at the time, I couldn’t properly appreciate his achievement. Now I have a better idea…
When I first stepped into the role, being a CEO seemed daunting. I had respect for the responsibilities and power such a role brings with it regardless of how large or small an organisation you lead. When I was appointed I was 31 and I was lucky to have a wonderful mentor who had a wealth of first hand experience of what it was like to have an executive role as a young woman.
Over the past ten years the organisation I lead has achieved much. Every time we publish a new Impact Report, I look back at the year and reflect proudly on all that our staff, Trustees and Members have done. Each time, my respect for and appreciation of how much impact we can make as a community is rekindled.
As a new CEO, what motivated me was curiosity and confidence. Every day brought new challenges and my working life was far from boring. I was keen to challenge myself. Curious to find out whether I was equal to meeting the demands of an executive role. What I lacked in experience, I made up for in organisational knowledge. I had several roles in the organisation before I was appointed as CEO and that allowed me to get to know the organisation from the ground up. Having seen what we do at events and for Members, I was confident that I had what it took to make a positive contribution, to help the organisation thrive.
Forging my path and finding my voice was never easy. For a time, I was so focused on my work that I became nearly synonymous with the organisation. Our values align with my personal ones so strongly, that it felt rewarding to stay in the flow of work for much of my time. We were making great strides to transform the organisation and the way we worked and I loved seeing my hopes become a reality.
With the help of many colleagues and inspired by many keynotes, blog posts and conversations I gradually found my voice. Once I found it, I used it to amplify our work and increasingly also my personal professional priorities. My blog became a place where that started to happen more and more and on social media and later on internet radio, too, I found ways to build a personal network. Around the same time, I started give a series of keynotes, including one at the ALT Annual Conference in 2018, that helped me to articulate my particular perspective more widely.
Throughout this period, I have benefited much from everyone around me sharing their practice. It may still be quite rare to find leaders who do, but in our community there are many who work in the open with generosity and grace. Inspired by their example, I share my expertise and experience both in my day to day work and beyond it. I am working on a book on leading virtual teams which is due to be published later this year and I have begun to coach women seeking to develop in their careers in Learning Technology on a pro-bono basis.
So what’s next? Ten years is a long time in the same job, especially a high pressure job. To me, it feels like I have had at least three different jobs over the past ten years. The first five years as a CEO in the aftermath of the financial crisis in 2008 were a steep learning curve. Then the transition to leading a virtual team in 2017 and closing our office in 2018 provided a unique a new opportunity for learning how to run our organisation all over again. And then the global pandemic happened and in 2020 and 2021 we had to adopt a new business model as the Learning Technology landscape changed beyond recognition.
I can honestly say I have never had a boring week and that is exactly what I was hoping for when I applied for the job. I also have the privilege of working with a wonderful group of people, our Board and Members, a deputy I can trust and colleagues whom I love working with.
The past two years have prompted many to re-evaluate their work/life balance and make a change. For me working throughout the dark days and months of lockdown has only increased my respect for our community and given me a renewed sense of purpose. All the reasons why I felt that the work we do is important ten years ago have now taken on a new context, a new sense of urgency as the digital dimension of education has become a more contested space.
Whilst the constant uncertainty of the past two years has made it clear that it is not wise to assume that we know what is ahead, I am grateful that I will continue to serve as the CEO of ALT for the foreseeable future. I hope to bring the same curiosity and confidence that I have started with, with added expertise and experience that I have gained in the past ten years.
Most importantly, I feel a fierce commitment to working for an independent charity that has found its voice grow more influential and that gives me the support and space to have my own voice, too.
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.
In these times, which for some of us are becoming post pandemic days and for others are still very much pandemic days, it is important to find sustainable ways to support the causes we care about.
No one working in education or education technology has much time, energy or bandwidth after the past two years.
I first become involved in FemEdTech because I wanted to do something to increase equality in Learning Technology. At the time, it was gender equality that I was particularly focused on. My own experience of working in the sector had highlighted how far we still had to go, particularly at a more senior level. Joining this community helped me identify practical actions I could take to make a difference and helped me increase my awareness of the structural inequalities that caused many of the issues I wanted to tackle.
When Invisible Women was published in 2019 it felt like new perspectives and dialogues were opened up. The book helped raise awareness as well as highlighting many (to me new) biases against women in every arena of life. Learning Technology needed to confront its own biases, not only gender biases, but all (inherent) ways in which it contributes to inequality and discrimination.
The past two years have heightened my perception that we need to act and my day to day work has become more focused on these issues. I am learning more about how to take anti-racism action in Learning Technology, about developing an ethical framework for professional practice and so forth. It has been heartening to see projects that set out to tackle inequality.
That said, I also feel that in some ways things have never been worse when it comes to gender inequality. Even what limited data we have points to women experiencing a greater detrimental impact from the pandemic in everything from research to housework. All around me are colleagues in crisis, struggling with burnout and juggling ever increasing care commitments with hybrid working.
For all of us, I hope that a gradual return to our online space may provide a sense of hope. A small ray of sunshine in what for many is a bleak time. For this reason, and whilst we do some admin and overhauling of our community processes, I have decided to focus on wellbeing and care during my time as a curator.
I am going to retweet, follow and help share news from across our community. And I am also going to post some moments of calm and hope, sending a little bit of care from me to you.
If you feel like saying hello.. please do. And if you don’t have capacity to engage at all, then we’ll still be here whenever you feel like returning to this space.
If you havenât come across FemEdTech before, I encourage you to:
January was extremely busy for me and I am glad that I took a week’s holiday from my day job and focused on writing. It was the first time since my PhD years that I spent so much time focusing on writing, and I really enjoyed it.
For the week of the writing retreat, I set a number of aims:
I am pleased to say that I accomplished the first two, and that I have updated the information on the book page accordingly. The book will be called Leading Virtual Teams – Field Notes from a CEO by Dr Maren Deepwell and will be published in 2022 as an open access publication by the Association for Learning Technology, UK.
The book is subtitled Field Notes from a CEO because my years as an Anthropologist gave me a researcherâs mindset that I have never quite left behind. Although I have settled into a different mindset in my ten years as a CEO, no longer just observing, but leading, I still find myself just as curious about seeing the world from someone elseâs viewpoint and doing my best to walk a few steps in their shoes. Leading a virtual team has challenged that ambition in interesting ways, and provided me with a new field for exploration.
I also made significant progress editing the first draft into a more coherent and complete 2nd draft. Of the 51,000 words I wrote since last summer, 47,500 have made it into the nearly completed version. The overall book will be ~55,000 words long.
What’s left to do is to finish editing Chapter 4, which I wrote first in July last year, and which needs the most work and also to rewrite the conclusion and expand it. I left the conclusion to last, dropping in fragments along the way, as I wanted to get a feel for what the book would be like overall, before finalising my concluding thoughts.
By the end of this month, the complete 2nd version will be finished and then the next steps await me: getting feedback from a wider circle of critical friends and readers, liaising with our publishing partner to progress the copy editing and deciding on a cover for the book, too.
Exciting times ahead, that’s for sure!
Join our monthly radio meet up on DS106radio. This time I’ll be talking about the writing retreat and share news on book progress on Wednesday, 9th February 2022 at 19:00 GMT on DS106 Radio – chat with me or submit song requests #DS106radio.
The first month of coach training has given me a lot of prompts for reflection. One of the fundamental coaching techniques I am learning more about is how to use powerful questions and as I was writing, I discovered that many of the reflective prompts and questions included in various chapters could be used in this context, too.
One of the ideas this has given me is to create a set of questions specifically about working from home and being part of virtual teams, that could be used in a coaching context, and could also be helpful in wider professional practice. I hope to share these in a future monthly update.
Posey has been an excellent writing buddy, and we have been taking regular breaks from the computer together as well as our regular afternoon walks. However, the best thing for her this month has been to finally be allowed in the office full-time.
