Maren Deepwell

Author: Maren Deepwell

  • One: Follow the tortoise (to save the world)

    Andy Warhol wrote a book called THE Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) published in 1975 and as you might expect, it’s a bit of a strange read. It’s definitely not a book that takes you in a straight line from A to B. It’s more of a peek into a very singular imagination. One which you can easily get lost in. On the contents page of the book at the very top is the phrase “You Can’t Argue with Your Scrapbook” (I like that EVERY word is capitalised even in the contents section – it gives you an immediate sense of the importance of the ramblings that are to follow… ) and this is very much what this post is going to be like. A walk through of some pages of my scrapbook, sorry, My Scrapbook, about how we experience spaces, particularly urban spaces and to think about an embodied perspective as well as a technologically mediated one. I’m thinking about why how we perceive and interact with our environment matters and how it can become an act of resistance. Curiosity v capitalist conformity if you like.

    It was this tweet that brought these ideas back to the forefront of my mind:

    The thread of all the answers makes for interesting reading. Although the idea of getting lost by car feels like an America’s concept to me. I am not sure most of the places I drive to are big enough to get lost in on purpose or with fun to be had (unless you count British one way systems). But the tweet struck a real chord with me because I feel that in this age of search and GPS getting lost is underrated. Whenever I see a tourist navigating Oxford or London with their phone held at eye level, staring with concentration at the street-view of where they are, reading the notifications that pop up about buildings and sights as they pass, I wish they would put the phone away and look around instead. I wish they would follow their feet and experience the place for themselves and discover makes them curious. Not to follow a predetermined route or learn only about what others or an algorithm deem important. 

    There are three concepts/metaphors related to getting lost and walking in the city that I am interested in: the slow walk or ‘ flanerie’ through the city that Benjamin and Baudelaire wrote about, the ‘derive’, that drifting through urban space that Guy Debord first wrote of and that was an important part of the Situationist International movement and the embodied practice of exploring a place with all our senses engaged to create a phenomenological perspective which is often associated with studying landscapes in Anthropology and Archaeology. 

    As an aside, as I mentioned in the introduction to this series, I really need to find some more diverse references for these ideas and concepts. The current list is only a starting point – I did create the Neon Flaneuse not a Flaneur intentionally. Suggestions and links via Twitter to @neonFlaneuse would be gratefully received. 

    Anyway, let’s get back to The Scrapbook and why these three concepts can be useful to think with now, in our context:

    Phenomenological studies of prehistoric landscapes may not immediately spring to mind as an obvious reference point… but how we create meaning through our experience of a particular place and what mediates that experience is highly relevant to our relationship to technology. It helps articulate the contested, shifting nature of places and encourages us to consider the limitations of what we can capture about a place or an object (in images or words or other data). Placing primary focus on human experience, our individual points of view, presents an interesting challenge to data driven narratives.

    The following two quotes give you a better idea (feel free to skip this bit, it gets less dense again further down). The first one is by Barbara Bender (2006) , an Archaeologist and Anthropologist who wrote much about landscapes but her work could be equally applied to cityscapes and urban sprawls:  

    ‘Landscape’ is . . . ‘the world out there’ as understood, experienced, and engaged with through human consciousness and active involvement. Thus it is a subjective notion, and being subjective and open to many understandings it is volatile.’

    The second quote is from Chris Tilley, who alongside Barbara Bender was at the Department of Anthropology at UCL when I was a student there and my PhD supervisor. 

    He talks about how we as human beings experience things, places or objects, through our senses, i.e. an embodied perspective, shaped by our physical bodies. He argues in his introduction to Identity, Place, Landscape and Heritage (2006) that ‘as our ‘involvement in the world is always situated as taking place from a point of view’ and also situated in time what we can capture and communicate is necessarily limited. Or, as he puts it, 

    ‘The body is both interpretational constraint and enabling condition for the construction of meaning.’ 

    If you don’t find this kind of phrasing particularly accessible, then you know now what my years as a research student were like.

    What is relevant to me is that a lot of technology places an emphasis on only one of our senses, the visual, and often neglects all the others. This doesn’t just hold true for how we use tech but also extends to representations of the world that are based on data we collect, on words and images and other information. So if I walk down a street and I smell a bakery, I might go there and buy a donut. A drone wouldn’t. What smells delicious to me may not appeal to you. What feels like a steep climb or a tall step or a big jump to me… may be perceived differently by someone who is taller or stronger or braver. My primary way of making my way through the world is to rely on my body, hence it enables me to make sense of the world. And as there is no other way for me to be alive (AI evangelists need not apply here) it is also a constraint, i.e. the only way for me to make sense of the world.

    Add to that all that ‘being me’ brings with it and add that to the way I interact with the world or with particular places and then multiply by all the other people on the planet and you get what Barbara Bender means when she says our involvement in the world is always situated.

    Complicated quotes aside, the situatedness of human experience is a concept that is very relevant to human-computer interaction. Without sufficiently being able to understand and plan for that element of human social interaction problems of mutual intelligibility arise, and Anthropologist Lucy A. Suchman has written much on this subject, including this book which I will be adding to my reading list (and which I came across in a post on situated degree pathways – thanks 🙂 )

    Already 1,000 words written and lots of obscure references thrown in and I haven’t even gotten to the second idea I wanted to discuss yet. I am not sure that bodes well for this new blogging venture, but we made it to the beach now in any case… . 

    Another book I came across (and which is now on my reading list) is The Beach Beneath the Street – The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International by McKenzie Wark. According to Wikipedia, McKenzie Wark is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at The New School in New York City. Wark’s work sounds really interesting and whilst I have come across some of her writing on technology, there is clearly a lot more to discover. 

    Thanks to Wikipedia (and as I don’t have any of the source materials to hand) you can read a very comprehensive summary of what the Situationist International movement was all about. Although its active period as an artistic and later political movement (1950s-1970s) is behind us, its critique of advanced capitalism is directly related to the concerns about surveillance capitalism, social alienation and passive consumption that we currently discuss. The beach metaphor comes into it in relation to ‘situations, moments of life deliberately constructed for the purpose of reawakening and pursuing authentic desires, experiencing the feeling of life and adventure, and the liberation of everyday life’. 

    Drifting through the city, following wherever your feet may take you, stepping off the map, getting lost in the sprawl of the metropolis… following your curiosity. Taking time, being present. Not being tracked. If the Situationist International movement was revived today it would probably be a mindfulness tracking app with ethical, vegan wellbeing product tie-ins on Instagram. I don’t want to look for it in case there already is one.

    But the radical vision at the heart of the movement, the anger and resistance that found its expression in the insurrections in France in May 1968, must not be lost. The desire to be liberated from the capitalist quotidian, to find alternatives to the prevailing social and economic narrative, is now more relevant than ever. Looking up, reclaiming our streets and cities from row upon row of homogenous shops and offices for communities not corporations is a fight to be fought now as it was then. 

    But there is no time as we are on our way to 10,000 steps a day. No time to stop, slow down.

    Which is where the Neon Flaneuse and its origin come in. 

    I imagine, that if you were invited for tea by the heroine of my story (she only drinks Lady Grey, in case you are wondering) and had a look at her bookshelves, you’d find a book that every self respecting Flaneur ought to own: Momo by Michael Ende. Published in 1973, one of the book’s themes is the commodification of time, but it also features a ‘living doll’ and many other technologies which a few decades later read like an edtech development plan or marketing manual (not a lot has been written about Momo, but this article in Kronoscope contains a useful summary). 

    One of the main characters in the book is the tortoise Cassiopeia, a magical tortoise which can communicate through words that appear in glowing letters on her back: FOLLOW ME. 

    By following the tortoise, and walking at the pace of the tortoise instead of rushing faster and faster, the girl Momo makes her way to try and save the world. The pace of the tortoise is important in the story, and as a metaphor it resonates with the concept of “flanerie”, of slowly walking through the city. The pace at which you may perceive and discover things, get lost and drift for a while.

    It’s a romantic metaphor I admit, but it is also a radical one. It is radical in part because it rejects our path as a linear narrative from A to B, it rejects conformity in favour of curiosity. It is radical because it is about stepping off the grid and onto the beach, to really look. Perception that may lead to reflection and resistance.

    ‘Follow the Tortoise’

    Soundtrack for this post:
    Heart of Gold by Neil Young and his album On the Beach. 

    Also…

  • Virtual Teams: Finding Oxygen with Olaf Hubel at Google – podcast special 2019

    Welcome to this month’s  special podcast (cross-posted here) in which we, that is Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey) and Maren Deepwell (@marendeepwell), openly share our approach to leading a virtual team.   If this is your first time visiting this post series or you’d like to review what we’ve posted in 2019 Maren has a Virtual Teams summary page.

    This time we are joined by our special guest, Olaf Hubel G Suite Developer Relations Team Leader at Google. Together we talk about what it takes to lead a virtual team, collaboration and team communication.  

    Listen to the podcast.

    This month: podcast with special guest Olaf Hubel (Google)

    Martin: So Maren what were your main takeaways from our podcast with Olaf Hubel?

    Maren: I really enjoyed talking to Olaf and I got a lot of food for thought from our conversation. One topic we discussed was how important interaction is for virtual teams and Olaf described the different approaches he uses to manage that both formally as part of team meetings and informally through things like water cooler hangouts and chat. We have a water cooler chat channel for our team and recently there were some real stand out moments for me, such as the morning when we all met a new puppy of one of our colleagues or when I was mid transit whilst travelling and the chat was suddenly all about domestic chores with a lovely pic that made me smile 🙂
    Leading a virtual team requires us to be more intentional when it comes to informal interactions like that. We can’t rely on serendipity (and I’d argue you shouldn’t for co-located teams either). Providing tools is only part of the equation. We also need to put in place & maintain the necessary structures and that is something I feel we’ve learnt a lot about in the past two years. We’ve moved from experimenting with different formats and strategies to a more regular rhythm of working together. Hearing Olaf talk about focusing on team interaction as both valid and important really chimed with me. What about you? Are there any talking points that stood out for you? 

    Martin: It was striking to me the number of similarities in the way that our team operates to Olaf’s team. This is perhaps not surprising as given ALT uses a number of tools that have been developed by Google. There were some small things I had never considered before until Olaf highlighted them like by default your webcam is on when you join a Google Hangouts Meet to encourage you to use video. As ALT has a number of video conferencing tools at our disposal with some to default to video off it’s interesting to reflect on the behaviours it encourages. Like you I found it interesting to hear about how some of the informal interactions were sometimes orchestrated. Besides the water cooler chat, ideas like the Monday morning social where Olaf’s team hangout just to share non-work related things like things they got up to at the weekend seemed like nice opportunities to build social connections. It was also interesting to hear how Olaf organised some of the formal interactions, in particular, dedicating a day for scheduled catch-ups with team members. As someone with a touch of OCD I could see how having a regular timetabled slot each week could be useful. The final thing I’ll mention was Olaf’s reference to Google’s Project Oxygen where “Google set out to determine what makes a manager great at Google”. We didn’t go into much detail about Project Oxygen but subsequently I know we’ve both explored the re:Work website which “Google and others to help share and push forward the practice and research of data-driven HR”. What’s your take on re:Work and Project Oxygen?  

    Maren: it made for interesting reading for me! One key point it got me thinking about was scale. The more people are involved and the more levels of management you have the harder it becomes to get a sense of what good practice should look like and what is happening on the ground. Project Oxygen, for me, is an expression of meeting those challenges and providing output that can be scaled up to the size of a global corporation. The 10 behaviours of good management identified in the report all read like common sense, but putting that into practice consistently remains a challenge. The example you picked up on, scheduling catch ups for everyone at the same time each week, is particularly relevant to me. I already have weekly catch ups planned, but the process of scheduling them in itself is very time intensive. Each week or month I need to repeat the process. Taking inspiration from Olaf, I’m going to try the approach he shared, and by sending out one repeat calendar invite per person and in this manner I’ve now scheduled weekly catch ups with everyone for the whole year. For me, that’s a big win. Yet, beyond the efficiency, the regular schedule should also help to create a better rhythm for us as a team, with specific days each week for different meetings, both informal and formal. It should help everyone structure their time and that is particularly relevant for you and I, as we always struggle to carve our sufficient head space for strategic planning. Structure is so important for us as a virtual team and it can be hard work to create and maintain that when each week the calendar looks completely different. I LOVE planning support, structures, evaluation processes and so on and it is so attractive to look at the reporting and tools being shared on the re:Work site and try them out in our context. That said, I also know first hand that much of what makes work life tick day to day is hard to capture in quantitative data sets. Olaf emphasised the importance and value of spending time, communicating, building relationships and that I really chimed with me. It’s a constant regardless of whether you share a desk or whether you are an ocean apart. 

    Martin: Another aspect of relying on quantitative data, particularly when what is being measured leads to reward is Campbell’s Law, that is “the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor”. Looking at the Google Manager Feedback Survey, which is based around 13 quantitative and two qualitative questions I could see it being an easy to fall into the trap of managing to the survey. Perhaps this in itself is not necessarily a bad thing because as you mentioned these questions are designed to measure behaviours that appear to be common sense and personally I value a manager who ‘assigns stretch opportunities to help me develop in my career’, ‘communicates clear goals’, ‘gives me actionable feedback on a regular basis’ and so on. Saying all of this Olaf doesn’t seem like the type of person who teaches to the test. I hadn’t actually appreciated the size of Google as an employer. When we spoke to Olaf I mentioned ‘ten of thousands’ of employees. As of Q3 2019 Wikipedia lists Google as employing 114,096, which is a scale I find hard to get my head around. With that scale it’s perhaps not surprising that the re:Work site includes a section dedicated to ‘People Analytics’, something not really needed when you employ 6 people … I would guess, or do you see it differently?

    Maren: We are definitely on the same page here. For me, it comes back to values. From the outset our journey to become a virtual team has been informed by our values, and over the past two years we have learnt much about how to put those values into practice at different levels and we’ve blogged about it along the way: from an employer perspective we’ve talked about formal policies, financial support and flexible working; reflecting on our organisation we’ve discussed priorities like support for staff, professional development and our technical infrastructure; as senior staff we’ve shared the challenges of managing a crisis as a virtual team, delivering large events and our team culture; and as individuals we have thought much about the personal dimension of being a  home-worker, from mental-health and well being to work/life balance and physical work spaces. Talking to Olaf brought into perspective that we are no longer in the process of ‘setting up’ a virtual organisation but that we are actually running a highly successful distributed team (and thanks to our recently published Impact Report 2017-2020, we have the GIFs to prove it ;). When becoming a virtual team was still nothing more than a spreadsheet, we talked about how leading a transition like this would be a unique opportunity for us and it has been an extremely rewarding one. Hard work for sure, but rewarding nonetheless. That said, I feel that now that the set up period and transition has been successfully concluded, working in this manner is just as interesting and keeps bringing up new things to learn, think about and share. From your perspective, would you agree that we are in a new chapter and is there anything ahead that you are particularly curious about?   

    Martin: I agree there is a maturity in our organisations approach to being a distributed team and as well as policy and procedure our team seem confident in our approach. Speaking to Olaf has been incredibly beneficial and I hadn’t anticipated how useful it was to speak to someone in a similar position and reflecting on the discussion afterwards. It was good to hear from Olaf and discover that there are a number of areas where our working practices are similar, which feels like validation of our approach, but also to learn about some of their working practices which we don’t already do but have started implementing. In 2020 I think it would be useful to find other people to speak to and share both the conversation and reflection so if you’d like to join us in a future podcast and share your experience of leading a Virtual Team please get in touch with us.

  • Introduction: Encounter in the edtech sprawl

    It was a rainy night and the neon lights of the arcades were reflected in the pools of water on the streets… in the air was the smell of wok fried herbs and spices from the street food vendors and a chill wind was coming up from the docks. Above the rushing crowd of late night shoppers and workers hurrying to the train home stood the towering office blocks and residential high rises. … Welcome to the edtech sprawl… where the future is all light up in neon… a dark figure… follow her footsteps… and meet our heroine:

    The ‘Neon Flaneuse’ 2019

    Welcome dear reader…

    This is the first post of a brand new blogging project and that’s a special moment. But before we jump right in, here is how this all began:

    The idea of the Neon Flaneuse was originally inspired by the Call for Proposals of the Domains19 conference for which I wrote the following submission:

    The Neon Flaneuse: taking steps towards empowered professional practice

    The flaneur or flaneuse, a person who saunters around observing society, a loafer, a lounger, was a popular figure in 19th century Paris. A model of the urban explorer in shopping arcades lit with gas lights. Walter Benjamin later popularised the figure of the flaneur in his Passagenwerk as an archetype of the modern, urban experience. 

    The flaneur combines a keen sense of observation and curiosity with a the slow pace of leisure and contemplation. A tortoise, the preferred pet of the flaneur, could set the pace of exploration. Yet as the industrialisation of cities increased and the pace of life grew more rapid, the figure disappeared. Enter: the neon flaneuse, the explorer of edtech sprawls who turns her critical gaze on the rapid pace of innovation, who poses questions about our relationship with technology, data and an uncertain future. 

    This short talk lights up in neon light not students or institutions but the people that make it all happen: whether your work is teaching, technology or training others, you can take steps towards empowered professional practice by exploring: 

    • How to work in the critical age of educational technology? 
    • What are the risks and upsides to working, thinking and reflecting in the open?
    • How can we promote equality through empowered professional practice? 

    Join the Neon Flaneuse on a walk through examples of professional practice including the critical age of edtech chronicled by Martin Weller in his blog series on 25 years in edtech and the work of open scholars like Sheila MacNeill, Lorna Campbell and Melissa Highton which have inspired my work on open practice. 

    Like the flaneuse of the 19th century, it can feel like we are running out of space to wander, explore and ponder and out of time and privacy in a world of social networks and constant connectivity. Like the flaneuse of the 19th century we work in a context where the dominant perspective is still that of the privileged, male, white classes – a gaze that we need to develop awareness of and critical approaches to challenge and subvert. 

    The final avenue of exploration will be the growing #femedtech network, a professional network curated via the @femedtech Twitter account. As one of the volunteers active in the network I will share ideas and lessons learnt as well as a call to action to get involved in promoting equality for everyone in educational technology and establish a more empowered professional practice in the process. 

    So join me and the Neon Flaneuse on this saunter through the edtech sprawl of professional practice as we explore how we might light up the future. Hoverboards welcome 🙂

    … As it happens, I wasn’t able to go to the conference or deliver that session as planned, but I liked the idea so much that it kind of stayed with me. At the same time, I have been thinking about how I could make something more of my fledgling thoughts about edtech, art and anthropology. 

    So this newly minted blogging project, which will hopefully become a sketchbook of drawings and words and maybe even GIFs, is a bit of an exercise in connecting the dots between my different academic interests but also a prompt for me to think about educational technology in a different way, taking a step back from the work I do day to day.

    It’s the darkest time of year and like many I sometimes struggle to find ways to express my thoughts or find the will to keep writing, to keep articulating and sharing, to use the voice I have and value it regardless of what else might be going on. So as well as being about art, anthropology and edtech this is a venture of joy and resistance.

    I want to use the metaphor of the Neon Flaneuse to explore, to wander, to get lost in new ideas and ramblings. To create something that will give me joy and provide inspiration. It’s about the kind of alternative futures, the hope that Laura Czerniewicz so eloquently searched for (and found) in her OEB keynote. It’s my way of thinking about the stories that Audrey Watters reminds us we need to tell about edtech, its history, theory and its future. Our future.

    I’m not sure where this will go over the next year and that is a good thing. I have this big blank canvas on my own domain to play with and I’m going to follow my feet and see where it takes me, tortoise in tow.

    Soundtrack for this post:
    A rainy night in Soho by The Pogues – further listening suggestions for the playlist are welcome 🙂

    Also…


  • 2019 – the year on my ‘I love me’ wall

    Now, an ‘I love me’ wall is something Jim Groom introduced me to, ‘basically a space dedicated to all the stuff you’ve done..’. And I’ve come to embrace that concept wholeheartedly in my work space at home. Home working has never looked so stimulating and that’s a major plus on days when the heating is broken, the cat has been sick on the carpet and the doorbell rings with yet another delivery for next door. 

    In that spirit, this is the ‘I love me wall’ of the past year, celebrating the stuff I’ve done, been part of, am proud of and am inspired by… 

    Photo by Sandra Huskinson (@FieryRed1)

    One of the absolute highlights of my year was giving a keynote at the Social Media for Learning in Higher Education Conference in January, which led to conversations and collaborations that last for the whole year including this excellent webinar Academic online identity and social media .

    I really enjoyed working on this ‘keynote in three hashtags’… it was a great way to start the year, thinking about  how social media often comes with a general sense of the superficial, showing just the best side of myself, trying not to avoid being vulnerable for social media can be a toxic space for many, particularly for women, for people of colour, for anyone whom the trolls choose to single out. The talk focuses on three questions:

    • How is social media changing professional practice?
    • How does social media support openness in education?
    • Social media for social good?

    You can access the slide deck at https://go.alt.ac.uk/SocMedHE18Keynote or read the summary post here.

    A completely different kind of conversation started a month later, when I took part in a panel discussion at the Royal Society in London on Human Transformation Remembering and Learning alongside Diana Laurillard and Diana made a point that really resonated with me: Diana reminded us of the enormous scale of the demand for education (at all levels) worldwide. Diana reflected on how many hundreds of thousands of teachers will be needed to provide education and training as more and more learners in the global South in particular gain access to education and come online. 

    Keynoting at the RIDE Conference. Image: Sarah Sherman

    One of my favourite talks of this year was at the at the 13th Research and Innovation in Distance Education, and eLearning (RIDE) annual conference which took place on 14 March 2019 in London. This year’s conference focused on the themes ‘Professional development and student experience’ and my talk examined these as challenges for digital education.

    It was the interplay between learning and technology, how they effect each other to change our understanding and our practice, that is of particular interest. One of the areas of high priority I discussed is measuring learning, an interest in assessment and in a wide range of methods to quantify, track and chart all aspects of the learner experience. There is always a promise that with enough data and dashboards we can gain insights, leverage the power of learning analytics to understand more about how what we do impacts on progress, skills development and learning outcomes. It is up to us to develop our own capabilities in order to be able to understand fully how the more complex systems we use work, what determines when a ‘red flag’ goes up and how we should interpret and act on the information we gain in this manner. One of the last points I mad in this part of the talk picks up on a section of the 2018 Horizon Report, which describes rethinking the role of educators not as a solvable or even a difficult challenge, but a wicked one, as ‘complex to define, much less address’. This is why I think the work that my organisation does is so important, charting the changing role of professionals across sectors. This particular was a really valuable opportunity for me to explore this further with experts in distance education.

    You can access the full slide deck at https://go.alt.ac.uk/2EUioER or read the summary post.

    April had many highlights and a particularly special moment for me was to be joining #PressEdConf19 for a session that explored a conversational post format can be used to support reflective practice (read more here). The idea for the session came from an ongoing blog project in which Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey) and I write a monthly series of blog posts to openly share our approach to leadership. You can catch up on earlier posts and podcasts on this blog.

    It was a great experience to present at a Twitter only conference. I took part in quite a few virtual conferences this year, as a speaker and a participant and it is extremely useful to have those experiencing when you are have a role in organising events yourself.

    Later in the year we revisited the topic of conversational blogging in an unconference session at OEB Global. You can access the full slide deck here: https://go.alt.ac.uk/tts242 . 

    Gearing up for a @VConnecting session at #ccsummit with @MarenDeepwell & @dbeloved #CEOshoes #shoetweet (Photo by Christian Friedrich)

    May brought both online and in person interaction with the Creative Commons community as I was able to attend the CC Global Summit for the first time and it was a fantastic experience. I have long been involved in the Creative Commons community and various activities but this was my first visit to the event which is at the heart of it all and I was met with real warmth and welcoming acceptance. The creative and joyful atmosphere of the conference, from the handmade designs on the badges to the samba music playing throughout the museum conference venue conveyed a sense of celebration and joy at this meeting of so many in the Commons but also motivated to pull up your sleeves, get stuck in and do plenty of work (and there was A LOT to be done). Here I wrote about my experience in 10 tweets.

    Photo: Clint Lalonde

    In June I had the pleasure of participating in the ETUG conference in Kamloops, Canada. It was a real privilege for me to be there, to have been invited to contribute a keynote ‘You are more than a data point. Weaving a tapestry of hope and humanity’ to ETUG’s 25th Anniversary Conference, and also to have the honour of taking part in National Indigenous Peoples Day. I learnt a lot from my time in Kamloops and I wrote a couple of posts reflecting on the experience and the keynote I contributed:

    “I felt very much at home at the ETUG conference because just like the ALT community it is all about collaboration, reflection and sharing of best practice. After 25 years of working together (celebrated with a great donut birthday cake) this community has come to hold dear very much the same values as I do, recognising the power of sharing practice and research and working together to make change happen for students and staff alike.

    And you could tell that this event was very much organised with heart. Little touches everywhere made participants and speakers feel welcome from the start and created a space in which the moving narrative from Elder Mike on National Indigenous Peoples Day found an equally receptive audience as the newest members of the community sharing research findings or #femedtech conversations about equality and women in #edtech.”

    This talk was one of the most satisfying pieces of work I did this year and it brought together some different elements of my thinking that I subsequently published as a rewritten article in Educause Review.

    #altc staff team portrait

    As you may know, we are a virtual team and everyone works from home (even during a heatwave). This way, we can better work with Members throughout the UK. Being a virtual team has many upsides but one downside is that I don’t get to see my colleagues very often. When we do get together, as we did in July, we sometimes create a team portrait (alternatives to photos as we are mostly a bit camera shy) and this is one of my all time favourites. I enjoy planning our team days and I put a lot of effort into the preparations, just like I would for an event. Writing about the Annual Conference Martin Weller called our approach ‘meticulously informal’ and that captures not just the way we run events but also the way we work together precisely. 

    In early August, when the weather was hot and most people were on their summer holiday, I went to our monthly online Members  Assembly meeting. Most of these meetings are virtual and the reason why I took a screenshot was that I found it so inspiring that despite the heat, holidays and probably a heavy workload, the room was full of volunteers, engaging, taking action. That’s the secret sauce of building sustainable communities of practice: share power, have a purpose, provide consistent, robust structures and put the time in. Even in August, during a heatwave. 

    Picture by Chris Bull for Association for Learning Technology on Flickr

    This community portrait taken at the ALT Annual Conference is the first of it’s kind for us. The moment of that photo means a lot to me. It captures a few hundred participants. I keep it on my desktop to remind me each day that we serve ten times as many Members. It helps illustrate the scale of the core community I represent, it makes something that is largely a virtual network more tangible. Over the past ten years I have probably met more than half of our Members in person or connected with them directly online. Each voice matters. My job is to listen and to make them heard. 

    This is a photo I took of the Extinction Rebellion Protest in Westminster on a day I had a meeting with senior Edtech policy officials. We sat inside the building discussing essentially how to make change happen whilst outside, on improvised barricades, thousands were singing songs of fear and hope. 

    From left to right: Christian Friedrich, Maren Deepwell, Lorna Campbell, Laura Czerniewicz, Martin Hawksey, Christina Rupprecht (at the cat wall, Wikimedia Deutschland offices), Source: Tweet

    Working in partnership with Wikimedia Germany I was involved in organising an event in late November, an evening of discussion and debate on education, open participation and democracy and critical reflections. It was a very special collaboration and part of our work for the OER20 coming up in April next year.

    There is one more big item to add to the ‘wall’ for this year, and that’s ALT’s Impact Report 2017-20 which was published yesterday. Because, of course, the whole ‘wall’ is green… the tapestry through which bright threads of my year are woven spells #altc.

    It is a huge privilege to be a CEO and it most definitely is hard work as well. Being in a leadership position brings into focus all elements of who I am and that is reflected in the way I think and work. Borrowing from my ETUG talk to close my reflections on 2019:

    …”That brings us back to my own story, my own perspective and professional journey as a Learning Technologist, an Anthropologist, an Artist, Star Trek fan, a carer and a woman. Some of you may be familiar with the OER Conferences that we organise and with the wonderful work of Kate Bowles who gave one of the keynotes at OER19 this year entitled ‘A quilt of stars: time, work and open pedagogy’. Kate and many other speakers and participants created a strong narrative of hope, a thread of open practice that stitches us together, a tapestry, a patchwork, a weaving together. In her blog post about the conference, Kate described her reflections as “a scrap of practice that makes sense through the labour of others who take time to read it, think about it, share it, ask questions of it, extend it” and I feel her words eloquently highlight all the invisible work, the unbilled effort, that is so often crucial to making change happen, from grassroots activism to academic practice.

    And this message of hope and kindness very much inspired my year. It reminds me that … we are all more than the data we create and our professional practice is more than can be tracked in time spent, papers marked or support tickets answered. Our practice becomes fully realised when we adopt a more mature and reflective, a more critical perspective that is informed by our stories and recognises the importance of the labour of others. Communities such as ALT are key to us collaborating and communicating in order to create a future for Learning Technology that is more open and equitable for all, to weave that tapestry of hope and humanity.”

  • 2019 – It’s been a #femEdTech kind of year

    If you don’t think gender inequality (in Learning Technology) is an issue that concerns you, this post is especially for you. Welcome!

    For those readers who are already interested in this topic, welcome back. It’s been a #femEdTech kind of year 🙂

    Maren Deepwell, Laura Czerniewicz, Helen Beetham

    For the last few years I have been actively involved as a volunteer in community efforts to promote gender equality in Learning Technology but this year my day job as CEO of the Association for Learning Technology took on a decidedly more #femEdTech flavour. 

    Now, it’s important to acknowledge that gender inequality is certainly not the only issue we are facing in Learning Technology and that there are other forms of inequality and discrimination that we need to continue to address and challenge. 

    But nonetheless it remains an issue from the gender pay gap to the gender data gap, representation at conferences and on executive boards, in policy making, on social media and so forth. 

    As I am in a position of relative privilege I can often exert influence over who I work with, who gets invited and who has a voice in what I do. But as soon as I leave my sphere of influence I am back to being the token female speaker on the agenda, the only woman around the table, the woman who gets trolled. Sigh. Sometimes cry. Often shout! 

    In this post, I am going to share the key pieces of my work on equality in Learning Technology from 2019. I hope they will be useful to you to explore, share, reuse:

    My year started at with a talk that brought together the threads of community, openness and equality:
    Community, Openness, Equality: a keynote in three hashtags #SocMedHE18 (talk, video): Social Media for Learning in Higher Education conference, 9 January 2019.

    Promoting equality in a distributed organisation, joint keynote with Martin Hawksey for International Women’s Day, University of the Highlands and Islands, 8 March 2019; this particular talk and the work we presented from the ALT Annual Survey provided a basis for other talks later this year, particular in relation to exploring a gender perspective of the professionalisation in Learning Technology, job roles and changes to this over the past 5 years:

    Who’s responsible for the future of open? #femedtech #oer19, contribution to #femedtech Open Space for OER19 conference; this is a short post I contributed to the #femedtech Open Space for the OER19 Conference in which I reflect on the importance of engagement:

    “… the only rule is to make use of your voice, to continue to engage and question, not to become indifferent or disengaged no matter how difficult that can seem at times. …It is, for me, a powerful reminder that we each have agency, and that taking part, contributing something that helps others understand our way of seeing the world, our perspective on open, our world view (as a women, as a feminist, as a contributor in my case) is a meaningful and important act.”

    UnCommon Women meet up at the Creative Commons Global Summit 2019

    And this certainly isn’t limited to the work we do here in the UK, or even the #femEdTech network, as there are many other communities and projects with similar aims.

    Continuing this thread and responding to the many requests for further information we received following the talk on International Women’s Day, we ran an online session to share more of the survey work: Webinar: Equality in Learning Technology: New insights from ALT’s Annual Survey,  with Martin Hawksey, 15 May 2019 and I was also invited to speak at a very interesting event on Technology and Education: opportunities and challenges for equality at the University of Sussex, 17 May 2019.

    The #femEdTech network is made up of activists all of whom ‘represent’ the network in their own contexts. But we, and who that ‘we’ is changes quite often, get regular requests to write about what we do and I volunteered to write this particular post: Building a Network for Curation – the #femedtech movement, blog post for WCET, 22 August 2019; the post gives a short summary of what the network is, what activities members engage in and examples of the types of things we have done in the past.

    A drawing that reads #femedtech and

    And there was a lot of talk of #femEdTech also with Terry on the podcast: Gettin’ Air with Terry Greene, 23 August 2019; which I really enjoyed. You can listen to the episode here.

    And that really set the tone for the remainder of the year, making the most of every opportunity to include something about equality in Learning Technology and contribute to the conversation including this post on HUMANITY OF DATA.. #ALTC on femedtech.net, 27 August 2019; and an article I wrote for the Educause Review on Learning Technology as a Professional Practice: Developing a Critical Perspective, Educause Review, 14 October 2019; and finally at Open for a cause: fostering participation in society and education, panel conversation with Lorna Campbell and Audrey Watters, Wikimedia Deutschland, 27 November 2019. This last event in particular presented a chance to speak about an exciting project that is coming up in 2020: The femedtech Quilt of Care and Justice in Open Education.

    I also want to reflect briefly on how to challenge the status quo and keep going… .

    Male only conference, event, panel? No!
    I no longer accept invitations to male only events or panels and I always ask to see the list of speakers/full agenda. Many organisers I respond to to ask about other female speakers seemingly have not thought about this. Full stop. In many cases the conversation leads to changes to the agenda to be more balanced and I have plenty of lists of speakers I can refer them to if they are looking for speakers on particular topics. This is an old problem, but I figure that I can be one less person to accept it and if more and more people join in then ‘manels’ will soon be a thing of the past. 

    Women’s issue? No!
    As you can see from the list above, this year I started to include something about gender equality in pretty much every talk I have given, regardless of context or audience. I reject the idea that gender equality as an issue should be confined to women’s networks or International Women’s Days etc. It’s everyone’s responsibility. It’s fundamental to the work we do in any sector. Eye rolling, sighing and other ‘oh, here she goes again’ reactions are common. Regardless of how many graphs I show or stats I include to provide a dispassionate, well-referenced and balanced argument, the uncomfortable truth is that gender equality requires change and disruption for every single one of us. 

    Vote = equality? No!
    I often come across the perception that gender inequality is no longer a thing. That at least in the UK the fact that women have the vote means that the problem has been sorted. Be content already. This is precisely why I include something to address this misconception in every talk. I’d also recommend reading up on the research (Invisible Women – exposing data bias in a world designed for men by Caroline Criado-Perez is a good place to start). 

    Allies – thank you!
    I am fortunately not high profile enough on social media to attract a lot of trolling, but keeping up this work year in, year out is hard enough given what I do have to contend with. Luckily I have allies, both men and women and those who identify differently, whom I am grateful for. Every time I hear their voices, see their actions, notice their efforts, I am glad that they are there. Some of them are very visible and others work behind the scenes, but all of them make a difference and they inspire me to do what I can to make change, too. Some moments of this year, like this VConnecting session at the ETUG 25th Anniversary Conference, have stayed with me:

    So, gender inequality in Learning Technology, we are coming to get you… from collecting data about pay, promotions and professional practice to calling out harassment, discrimination and ignorance on the web and in the physical world.

    And if it all gets too much, then there is always the #femEdTech hashtag to follow and the TAGSExplorer of wibbly wobbly equality conversations to watch as they grow and expand… here is to a very #femEdTech new year.

  • Virtual Teams: CPD and CO2

    Welcome to this month’s post (cross-posted here) in which we, that is Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey) and Maren Deepwell (@marendeepwell), openly share our approach to leading a virtual team. 

    If you haven’t come across our work before or like to find out more, you can catch up on earlier posts on our blogs, podcasts or find out more about ALT, the organisation we work for.

    This time we talk about staff benefits and CPD opportunities for virtual teams, the environmental impact of work travel and discuss the advantages of connecting both virtually and in person. 

    November

    Maren: we’ve done two new pieces of work recently: creating a new guide about what benefits our organisation offers to staff and running the first couple of team sprints. Before now, the information about staff benefits was in quite a few different places and drawing it all together into one doc really brought home to me how much there is! What’s particularly interesting is to look at it from the perspective of leading a virtual team. Funding staff to attend training or CPD events for instance doesn’t in essence change – but it does make a difference where an individual lives, and subsequently which activities make for viable choices in terms of logistics and/or offer opportunities for meeting up in person for a catch up and so forth. Another realisation for me was how much more we now offer in contrast to a few years ago, when our organisation was still hosted within a university. As a team of less than 10 people, being hosted within a large building, a big institution, there was a much stronger reliance on whatever was already being offered, and often that did not meet our requirements. Subsequently a lot of the mandatory CPD felt a bit pointless but used up time. Something you added to the guide was how ALT supports staff to undertake mentoring. I was lucky to have an amazing mentor for many years and I really valued the work we did together. Looking back I realise that my mentor’s support was partly so essential because our internal set up didn’t actually offer what I really needed in my role. Much of what my mentor and I worked on was to navigate the structures we were working within and ultimately to move our organisation away from them. Now, I feel, we offer much more relevant benefits and flexible opportunities such as our weekly show & tell sessions at team meetings, CPD at team days, in-house training and recently virtual team sprints. 

    Martin: Your comment on staff attending CPD opportunities and where the person lives got me thinking. October/November turned out to be an exceptionally busy month for me in terms of travel. As well as our two day staff and Board meeting in London we were also at OEB in Berlin. In terms of my personal CPD I also had a weekend in Sunnyvale, CA for the Google Developer Experts Summit and various weekend excursions to present as part of DevFest. My Summit attendance was supported by ALT with time off, Google picking up the bill for travel and accommodation. I was embarrassed to tell people I was jumping on the plane for California for the weekend and in my heart felt it was the last time I could make that particular trip given the environmental impact it causes. The thought I have is with the predicted increase in flexible working are virtual or hybrid events becoming more feasible. With a growing proportion of the population confident with a virtual presence what does this look like in terms of conferences? You could perhaps argue it both ways, whilst traditional conferences have greater environmental impact when incorporated into a virtual teams calendar they provide opportunities for social interaction at the levels you can’t currently achieve with technology. ALT has personal experience of a range of delivery modes, both live streaming and supporting remote participation at our face-to-face events as well as fully online events such as the ALT Online Winter Conference, which starts next week and is free to attend. At the end of the day we are incredibly social animals and sometimes you can’t beat just hanging out, in the physical sense, with others. Something to also remember is ALT has a UK wide network of regional members groups and I wonder if there is more we can do to either support these by shifting the balance away from one big annual conference to regional events with an emphasis on allowing those from further afield to fully participate?   

    Maren: Reflecting on my personal experience, I’ve been on five long(ish) haul flights in the past ten years if you count flights within Europe, and since I started working for ALT in 2008, I’ve attended fewer than 15 events outside of the UK, on average 1-2 a year since I became CEO. Nearly every journey I take is by train and the majority of our team never travel outside of the UK for work. In contrast to countries like the US or Canada, the distances we generally have to manage are tiny and more often than not the majority of us can avoid air travel all together. So from the perspective of our team, I feel we have the right balance … When it comes to larger events, we only run 2 international face to face events a year and probably 50-75 regional or online ones – both centrally and locally organised. Whilst our biggest event of the year does attract an international audience the majority of participants come from the UK and travel by train. The OER conference is probably the event with most air miles to its name, with maybe 50-100 international travellers. And just like you and many of the participants I value that opportunity to connect in person very much. Some of the people who influence my thinking most I might only see once in a blue moon and whilst I share the environmental concerns you highlight, I think there are other strategies to address that at the scale on which we operate … My thoughts are now turning to planning for 2020 and making the most effective logistical plan for meeting in person as a team is a big challenge. Wherever possible I try to plan in such a way so as to save extra travel and combine trips, eg board meetings and site visits or conferences and team catch ups, appraisals and strategy days and so forth. The blended approach we have means that we can find affordances for both modes of working, rather than having to rigidly stick to one way of doing things. On a personal note, I have lived in a different country or far away from most of my family and friends for all of my adult life. For me, being able to connect in person has always been important and whilst I am now more capable than ever before to do so virtually, it doesn’t mean the same to me, neither in a personal context nor at work. I am not sure I would say one is better than the other and I would regret having to give up either. 

    Martin: I thought I’d do some maths – so working from home rather than my nearest city is approximately 1 tonne of CO2 (according to carbonfootprint.com) which is almost the same as 4 return flights from Edinburgh to London. I’m probably a couple of return flights over in terms of zero gain, but if I opt for rail I could reduce my personal carbon footprint substantially. One of the reasons I often end up on a flight is a combination of needing to be somewhere for an early start and unable to travel the day before as it’s an extra day we have to work out childcare cover. Anyway, this is all very much an aside, but discussing this has made me realise that I need to consider how I travel in 2020, but perhaps there is also something we can agree as a team to make rail travel easier like agreeing a later start time for staff days? Sometimes the small things can make big differences. If we agree on this it will be another detail in our staff handbook which after two years still feels like a robust document without getting lost in bureaucracy. Recently following a request that came into our inboxes I published the ‘ALT Virtual Teams Stack’, which summarised some of the main technology and services we use as part of our distributed team. Again it’s nice to start thinking beyond 2019 knowing we have a well established set of technology and services to build on what we do in 2020 and beyond. As part of our discussions for our next strategy for 2020-2025 one of the questions raised was evolution or revolution. With our infrastructure I feel it’s in a good place so I feel it makes more sense to continue to evolve (our decision to predominantly use Chromebooks also make us more energy efficient). Looking to 2020 and beyond I am looking forward to getting us on the Eduroam network and larger monitors, energy efficient ones of course. Next month we also have a podcast special where we had a chance to speak to Olaf Hubel who is a team leader at Google for the G Suite Developer Relations team, which has thrown up lots of useful guidance so stay tuned for the recording and our reflections.