Maren Deepwell

Author: Maren Deepwell

  • Messy human problems… blogging about Gettin’ Air with Terry Greene and a bit of #LTHEchat

    A few weeks ago I recorded an episode of Getting Air with host Terry Greene. This excellent podcast series is focused on all things technology-enabled and open learning practices and I was delighted to join Terry and really appreciated the opportunity to have this conversation. If you haven’t discovered this podcast for yourself, browse through the episodes and you are sure to find a conversation that is not to be missed… starting with the recent one featuring Audrey Watters, oh and Jim Groom, and Mia Zamora, and Autumm Caines… well, I think you see where this is going. There are 78 episodes to choose from, so get stuck in.

    https://voiced.ca/gettin-air/

    Terry started out the conversation with a question about the work I do and what ALT does: “So, tell if I am misunderstanding what ALT does, you try to solve messy human problems with technology, is that right…?” and that made us laugh as well as giving us a humorous way into talking about empowered professional practice in Learning Technology. But the question has stayed with me ever since, partly because I come across so many examples each day, of people trying to do or more often promising to do, precisely that.

    Heart…
    In the podcast, one of the things we talk about is community and the commonalities organisations like ALT and ETUG have. We talked about what gives communities or events a ‘heart’… . One of the things many try to do is to build sustainable communities of practice without giving any thought about what they are for and whom they are made up of. For example, when organisation A wants to disseminate its projects or organisation B wants to market its new products or organisation C feels it would be of strategic benefit to demonstrate its sector engagement then more often than not a community of practice, preferably a sustainable one, is the answer. Sustainable in this context means that it is being used as long as the funding lasts, rather than that there is a long term commitment to support it for the benefit of its members. And as with other free services the old “if it’s free you are the product” rule applies here, too. The messy side of this is that actual communities of practice need a lot more than that to become sustainable: things like a viable value proposition for its members, a purpose, a code of conduct (whether explicit or implicit), a business model that members understand and have a say in, ability to adapt and change, room for different voices and different views… and ways to grow and change over time. Such undertakings are all about people not the platform, they need a heart, however superficial that may sound, to really survive and thrive in the long term.

    Things you need to know…
    Terry and I talked a lot about professional practice and what it means to be a Learning Technologist or work in Open Education and one of the things that stayed with me is that there is a lot more you need to develop your professional practice than you can learn from a ‘3 minute video’. I use the video as a metaphor for a lot of the quick fix, tick box exercises in professional development that I come across again and again. These have headings like …”all you need to know about…” or “improve your teaching in 3 simple steps…” and so on. In a twitter chat (the special #altc edition of the LTHEchat recently) one of the questions that we discussed advice for new professionals and here are some of my favourite answers:

    There were many more examples I could have included here, and I suggest if you have a look yourself on the #LTHEchat hashtag – but one thing is clear is that professional practice is a lot more messy and complicated and interesting than can be captured in bite sized chunks.

    One of the things I reflected on afterwards was how easy it was to have this conversation with Terry. Although we have never met in person and most of our interaction previously has been online through VConnecting, Twitter or blog posts, I felt we had a really good rapport. Terry had done a lot of reading and I had done some listening and between us we established enough of an understanding to have an interesting conversation about things that matter to us, that interest us, and we ended up in some unexpected places, including cemeteries. Terry made an effort to engage with my work beyond the headlines and wasn’t afraid of getting into the messy creativity that lurks below.

    Thank you, Terry 🙂

  • A personal #altc preview: Edinburgh or virtually, here we come 🙂

    It’s nearly September and since 2008 that’s meant that – at least in my world – it’s time to get ready for ALT’s Annual Conference. It’s an exciting time of busy preparations, 101 things to remember and, importantly, shoes to line up to pack for the week ahead (those of you who know about #shoetweets will understand).

    Remixed with the Fabulous Remixer Machine

    As ALT’s chief executive my role in the conference run up is all about strategy, income generation, academic review procedures… in short, there are A LOT of spreadsheets involved and reports to write. It’s rewarding work and very important to ALT as a membership organisation. But there comes a time, and that’s today, when my thoughts turn more to what attending the conference would be like if I were a delegate… which sessions I would like to go to, whom I’d like to see speak or catch up with.

    So here is my personal #altc preview, if I was attending as a delegate, either virtually or in Edinburgh:

    In some ways I attend the conference virtually every year, because so much time is devoted to the conversation on the #altc hashtag. I really enjoyed reading what’s in store on social media and online this year in this post by Lorna Campbell. I particularly liked this bit:

    The ALT Conference has always had a really lively and engaging social media presence, which draws in participants from all over the world. I’m delighted to help facilitate this as part of ALT’s social media team, along with partners in crime Rich Goodman (@bulgenen), from the University of Loughborough, and photographer Chris Bull (@chrisbull1980).  My role is to livetweet the conference keynotes from ALT’s official twitter account @A_L_T, while Rich will be tweeting Chris’ photographs, which really capture the buzz and energy of the conference.  You can see Chris’ pictures from last year’s ALT Conference on ALT’s flickr channel, and in keeping with ALT’s strategic commitment to openness, they’re all Creative Commons licensed.

    That sent me down a rabbit hole of looking at photos from previous years and reminded me how much sessions like the Assembly Meeting, the Annual General Meeting and the CMALT Ceremony as well as the Learning Technologist of the Year Awards help make the conference the wonderful experience it often is. So these sessions are definitely in my calendar:

    My other plan for engaging with the conference, and other events I attend, is to try and find sessions about which I know very little and go to those in order to discover something new. In that spirit, the following session also get included on my #altc calendar:

    Last, I am planning to take some time to spend in the exhibition at the ALT Stand meeting Members. In my first year, when I didn’t know anyone, I was greatly relieved to be seeing some friendly faces, to be made to feel welcome and to have people to talk to who shared what their day to day work was like. A few years on and I still find sitting at the stand and listening the best use of my time for much of the conference. I might also have some #femedtech stickers and badges on me… 😉

    I’m also going to try and join into some of the remote activities like VConnecting and look out in particular for blog posts starting to flood in now that the guest posts written in the run up have concluded in a lovely welcome from the Co-Chairs.

    So, Edinburgh or virtually, here we come. This may be the calm before the storm, but I feel there is a fair (conference) wind blowing and that is something to be celebrated given the times we live in. For whatever joy, inspiration and enthusiasm next week holds in store, I think we are going to need every ounce of it in the year ahead. And maybe we will raise a ‘wee dram’ to that #altc.

  • Re-post: HUMANITY OF DATA.. #ALTC

    This post was originally published here http://femedtech.net/published/humanity-of-data-altc/ .

    Nice to CC you by Dr Maren Deepwell CC-BY-SA

    Inspired by this post by Frances Bell and the upcoming ALT Annual Conference I have been reading up on a this approach for “aspirational metrics” D’Ignazio & Klein (2018) use for their forthcoming book Data Feminism, and in particular their thoughts on the humanity of data, which I’m quoting below:

    We acknowledge the humanity of data

    We recognize that the transformation of human experience into data often entails a reduction in complexity and context. We further acknowledge that there is a long history of data being “all too often wielded as an instrument of oppression, reinforcing inequality and perpetuating injustice,” as the group Data for Black Lives explains. We keep these inherent constraints in mind as we write, attempting to introduce context and complexity whenever possible, and acknowledge the limits of the methods we discuss as well as their strengths.

    It’s of particular interest to me as I’ve talked a lot about gender equality in the last six months and ever since I have added graphs and tables to the talk, people have listened a lot more closely. There’s a lot to be said for having tangible, measurable indicators of progress or even lack thereof when it comes to talking about topics like gender inequality in the workplace, but I also worry that by focusing on the charts and graphs, on the data, we don’t do enough to acknowledge what’s being lost in the analysis. At least I don’t feel like I’m succeeding at putting something like the approach outlined above into practice the way I think it should.

    Partly, I believe, that is because it’s much easier to create a dialogue when the conversation is less personal and as a result less confrontational. It’s much more possible for most people, in this case for most men, to talk about recruitment targets or percentage point increases than it is to witness the narratives that in this context women may share about their everyday experience of discrimination or harassment.

    When we create visual representations of our human experience, in this case of women working in learning technology, much of what the authors call the complexity and context is reduced to commonality. In order to communicate the scale of the challenges we face we must reduce our individual stories to let’s say a single headline. A headline that grabs your attention, that conveys urgency and relevance.

    And yet…

    Whilst I know that there are big advantages to using data and data visualisations to tell this kind of story, and I am an avid reader of work that helps us chart and address the gender data gap, I think that it also helps to depersonalise the problem. Charts are rarely labelled ‘me and you’ if you know what I mean and it’s far easier to feel that the problem is somewhere else, someone else’s responsibility… rather than right here in this room and cause for personal action.

    That then is my hope for our conversation at the conference this year and for the values we share: that we will use whatever communication methods are at our disposal  to make more people feel that they have a role to play in fighting for gender equality (in learning technology), and further, that it is each and every one of us that needs to take some personal responsibility to make that change happen.

  • Reading, writing – and a budget line for time

    Like many, I have been inspired by posts and a conversation about writing, in particular these posts:

    I find it resonates with me because I, too, write all day and most of the time my audience is a folder or an upload bar. But I also have the privilege of having a voice and a platform to be heard, in my professional practice, and alongside that I have cultivated spaces (and time) in my life that allow me to write and think out loud on my own domain, in my journals, both in the open and in private.

    I think and reflect much through conversations, conversational writing and writing and I find without the discipline to keep articulating what’s in my head and in my heart, I am left with nothing to say. Like Kate writes in her post:

    This sense of being choked is spreading around a community of good writers I know, like ocean plastics. It’s as if we’re in an extinction-level event, even as we mostly work in universities, and we are also drowning in words.

    I had that post at the back of my mind during a conversation this week about the value of time, the value of creativity in professional practice. We were looking at a table charting progress and I was wondering about where on that particular spreadsheet we had a budget line for time to think. Time, as the poem says, “… and instantly there is space and the radiance of each bright galaxy”.

    I value what time to think, time to be creative, to have ideas and reflect, bring to my own professional practice and in my day job I likewise value that in others and for others. But even with those values, it’s hard to carve out space and time and give priority in amidst everything else that shouts much louder. In the matrix of urgent and important things I feel I need another axis for those things which are fundamental to long term well being and inspiration, things that mean something to us, that make what we do and say feel worthwhile. We need a budget line for time.

    In his post, Martin writes:

    Thinking of writing similarly as a finite resource may not be a bad mental trick to deploy for yourself. Where are you going to use that allocation up today? Is that what you want to do?

    So this morning, I woke up and with my coffee the cat and I read the Twitter conversation and instead of getting things done and start being productive, I started the day doing what I want to do and write this post.

  • Virtual Teams: Creativity Hacks for Virtual Teams (and why we maybe do like emoji after all)

    Hello and welcome to this month’s post on leading a virtual team. In this post (cross-posted here) the two of us, that is Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey) and Maren Deepwell (@marendeepwell), continue our series of openly sharing our approach to leadership. 

    If you are new here, you can catch up on earlier posts and podcasts or find out more about ALT, the organisation we work for as senior staff. We really appreciate comments and feedback and welcome questions or suggestions for future posts. 

    This time we get creative as we share our favourite ways to have some fun, create, collaborate and share. We also have another think about emoji.. which a year ago we gave a rather cold review. 

    July

    Maren: When I started thinking about this post, I realised that creativity is a much bigger part of how we collaborate as a team than I initially thought. I’m excited about having some fun and sharing a few of my favourite ideas from the last year, starting with this example of an alternative team portrait:

    We’ve made others, one with biscuits representing each member of the team particularly sticks in my mind, but this is definitely a favourite. A bag full of craft supplies, a table, an hour of chatting and making together and you have a fun, creative portrait. I much prefer this to posing for artfully smiley photos that end up on social media and the process of making the portrait together acts as a catalyst for conversation. 

    Another recent example of a bit of remixing fun as a team was creating our own Pet Top Trumps, featuring some of the four pawed companions we have as home workers: 

    One of the challenges of remote working is to find ways to interact with each other informally, to have some fun and that is particularly important when things are busy! Creating and sharing our Pet Top Trumps developed some new skills and really improved our spirits on a hot, long and busy summer day. These cards were remixed using the Fabulous Remixer Machine, which we also use in other creative ways. 

    Martin: Informal interaction is a really interesting point and thinking about it probably one of the toughest areas in a distributed team to get right. It’s quite easy to add informal conversations to the start/end of video calls but more challenging when catch-ups or team calls aren’t scheduled. It’s also probably easier to incorporate informal chat in one-to-ones because with our team meetings, particularly in Annual Conference prep mode, it feels like there is pressure that chatting might be delaying someone else from getting back to their to-do lists. In the past during busy periods we’ve also scheduled coffee breaks where we can hangout together. One of the challenges I find is when these have been purposefully set up they lose some of the spontaneity that you might get in a traditional office environment. Something I’ve found that works well is working with someone on a piece of work whilst in a video call with them. This could be a task like writing a piece of text together or working on some spreadsheet data. These moments are also useful for those serendipitous moments when you discover something new which might be a different way to do a task or just something you didn’t know about the other person. Within our team we also use a group text chat, which allows everyone to say hello in the morning and gives us opportunities similar to an office based chatting across the room. Currently we are using Google’s Classic Hangouts Chat for this which doesn’t have some of the additional features you get in the newer version, or other tools like Slack. Having used newer chat interfaces as part of other communities I’m part of I find my original dislike of emoji’s and reactions, which we talked about last year, slowly being eroded. I’ve yet to use these tools in the context of a virtual team and I can’t wait for Google to integrate the new Hangouts Chat into Gmail. When we talked about emoji almost a year ago you had similar hesitations for using these in a distributed team. Has your own view changed?

    Maren Bitmoji

    Maren: No. Yes. Maybe. My emoji literacy is still poor. I am one of those people who has to search for explanations of what ‘:s’ means… someone who having made her first ever Bitmoji promptly never made a second one. My icon vocabulary is rudimentary at best. I speak more Greek than emoji! That said, sometimes only a ‘:)’ will do, so I adjust how I express myself according to my audience. I value instant chat a lot for spontaneous interaction. Like you, I’m a year further into my experience using more ‘engaging, agile, responsive…’ chat interfaces. My feelings are still very mixed: I dislike that at times the volume of reactions/interactions can make the interaction meaningless, it becomes noise. I find the amount people have to actually engage or think about how they are reacting is minimal, which devalues the increase in interaction for me. I prefer someone not engaging to token reactions. I object to the notification push these interfaces try to dictate, i.e. ‘check who has liked your comment in the last hour…’. I don’t want to be notified in this way. And then there is context. Someone being silent can speak volumes and if they click the occasional ‘like’ I might miss their silence. So there are still a lot of downsides to the world of chat and emoji to me (and chatbots, for that matter). On the other hand, I love the playfulness, the fun, the sense of humour, creativity and flexibility these tools enable us to have. And that is really important in a team setting. I had an experience today discussing email, and a colleague pointed out a way in which we could save emails between us. The suggestion was prompted by them understanding how I work better, getting to know what’s important to me and why. A whole range of formal/informal communication led to that realisation, and to me, that’s what matters. Like drawing or walking or making something, I value things that get us thinking together. 

    Martin: In the case of reactions I can see a distinction between ‘likes’ in a personal setting compared to a professional context but at the same time, as we talked about in our last post, there is often a blur between social networks/chat in a work and personal life setting. I’ve only came across bitmoji recently and while I’ve seen others use them they are not something I’ve played with a great deal. Given the level of expression and potential outlet for creativity you get from some of the designer apps perhaps I should. Something that has put me off, particularly with the basic bitmoji you get with built-in virtual keyboards for Android, is the expression always seems a bit extreme for my mild mannered personality. While I’m becoming more inclined to emoji the next problem is given I’ve previously stated I dislike them in the past it feels more awkward to start using them purely because of my suborn streak. Given the reliance on online tools for virtual teams it’s perhaps worth remembering new tools get added, existing tools change in functionality and tools even get discontinued which means there is a degree of continual change with personal choices so having an organisational cultural alignment that supports this is important. In terms of creativity one of the aspects of my job I really enjoy is the opportunity to produce and collaborate on some of the artwork we use. This includes things like our Annual Conference splash screens to remixing some of the artwork and popup banners for the OER conference. Having recently bought a sticker machine I’ve been enjoying providing one-off creations. 

    CPD badge

    Maren: Stickers are a great example of a creative outlet. I also came across this digital badge, which I made on a drawing app and using Google slides, as part of the team appraisal process a couple of years ago. Making one/off badges for individual staff is a quick, creative way to provide recognition and feedback with a twist. Another example of a creative approach to feedback is the ‘positivity by post’ exercise we did recently. That involved using a template to send each other feedback by post and that was really interesting in that it was a) positive feedback only, b) handwritten and c) delivered by post rather than email. For me personally changing the method of communication made the process both more creative and impactful. The final example I’d like to mention is clothing.. shoes, t-shirts, hoodies:

  • Virtual Teams outtakes: Heatwave home-working

    It’s hot! Even for home-workers. So in this post, which is an ‘outtake’ from my regular series of Virtual Teams posts with Martin Hawksey, I share some of our experiences and tips for home-working during a heatwave…

    When I was still office-based hot days were always a challenge. Fans were going on all the desks, commuting was a nightmare (if the trains were running at all) and everyone was trying to schedule as much time away from their desk, taking calls outside, having meetings in the cafe and taking frequent trips to the water cooler to fill up their bottles. Working when the weather is really saying “you should be on a beach… in the park… or in the pub with a cold pint” is always hard.

    Dressing for the weather: one of the key advantages of being a home-worker during the heatwave is that you don’t have to leave the house, get on a train or sit in a meeting. You can wear shorts and t-shirts or loose clothing that would not adapt well to commuting or an office environment. For me, sleeveless silk blouses are a friend for formal meetings, but most days shorts and running gear makes work in hot temperatures much more productive!

    Cooling your work-space: Airing your work space as much as you can in the early morning or late in the evening is key and I also find drying large sheets/laundry near an open window is a great way to cool air as far as possible. I have a south-facing window in my work space at home, so the blinds come down by about 10am in order to keep the sun at bay during the hottest hours of the day.

    Fan yourself: Personally, I don’t like electrical fans, but having recently received a very useful hand fan from a friend I have found that to be an absolute life saver. It’s a great accessory not just during hot weather and will be firmly established in my travel bag.

    Care & check-in: Especially during hot weather frequent check ins are important and in our team we use instant chat for that as well as daily video contact. It’s important to check in with each other’s well being and acknowledge the unusual conditions as you would if you were co-located.

    Head outside: in my case the proximity of a road and a railway line and a building site makes working outside or in the garden a poor option, but some of my colleagues enjoy taking a laptop and heading outside at least for part of the day.

    The fridge is your friend…: One of the things I find much easier at home is keeping hydrated and eating well during the hot weather.

    Enjoy the sunshine 🙂