Category: Conferences

Conference post #ReclaimOpen25
I’m taking part in the Reclaim Open Conference this week, and my contribution is for the blog-a-thon. If you’ve landed on my blog for the first time, howdy! Welcome!

I’ve been blogging here since 2008 and I also send out a free monthly newsletter and host a podcast about hybrid working and leading in distributed organisations. I work as a consultant and coach with non-profits and small organisations, mainly in education and technology.

If you are a returning visitor, great to see you!

Here is my conference post in full, and a big THANK YOU to Bryan Mathers who captured the visual thought for the session and created this lovely image that now heads up the post!

Blogging as a professional practice superpower

A really common issue for leaders in Higher Ed and elsewhere is worrying about “is it just me who is struggling with this?”. When everyone works from home and all you see is a carefully curated or blurred background with a professional, well-groomed headshot framed by a flattering camera angle, it can be hard to get a sense of how others are coping day to day and easy to feel that you are the only one who is struggling.

I think this is where blogging can not only help, it can become a professional practice superpower.

Open practice in a leadership position is different from sharing things like new publications, or blogging about exciting projects. Many professionals in leadership roles maintain public profiles or a web presence like a blog. What I’m interested in is not necessarily about having a blog, but about the practice of blogging in itself.

The process of getting whatever you want to say in a post and press publish.

It’s about the joy of blogging, the sheer exuberance of having a space, a domain, to make your own. A vault or a personal archive as I’ve blogged about before.

It opens up a space to share the practice of leading, of managing people, not just the end results – and the reflective space it opens up can be incredibly powerful.

There are however some barriers to blogging, especially in a leadership role. When you are everyone’s boss, it’s not always easy to maintain an authentic space on the open web. So I use a couple of strategies to blog about my professional practice, specifically:

Choose a format that works: I vary how and where I blog, from my main WordPress site to voice recordings.

Modify how openly to share: from public, to semi-private to fully locked-down depending on topic.

Keep a list for the long term: I could use a tool to track projects, publications and other activities for me, but there’s great value for me in the act of processing what I have done and reflecting on it as I make and update the list.

To conclude, I also want to share one more strategy that I have found particularly useful over the years, which is to engage in conversational blogging, or co-leadership conversations. There are a range of conversational approaches that I have used to create the space needed to reflect together and blogging can be a great tool for that, too.

Thanks for reading my contribution to Reclaim Open 🙂

More to read and listen to:
04/11/2025
#ReclaimOpen25 Here we come!
It’s nearly time for Reclaim Open, and it’ll be my first time taking part in this special conference. You can read all about the conference on the Reclaim Blog, or take a look at the documentary that premiered at the last Reclaim Open. Taylor Jadin shared this with me recently and I LOVED watching it.

About the video: As Reclaim Hosting welcomes its 10th year, we’ve been doing a lot of reflecting on the principles that got us here. Namely, the open web. The Reclaim Open conference is all about that concept, and we want to capture it in as many meaningful and lasting ways as possible. We don’t want this documentary to only capture Reclaim’s thoughts on the open web, but to invite and include the amazing community joining us here to document their own perspectives and stories about this topic.

What I’m most looking forward to (many things)

There is A LOT to look forward to… so in no particular order:
- I’m excited to see the student showcase of the winners of the Reclaim Student Competition
- There’s the opening keynote by Bonnie Stewart, with the theme “Rewilding voice in a time of enclosure”
- Also on the plenary schedule is a panel hosted by Jim Groom “On Writing” and as an avid listener/viewer of this series I am especially looking forward to that
- Not to forget is the amazing artwork created by Bryan Mathers (including the images in this post) and seeing those come to live
- There are a host of social sessions around the DS106 Daily Create, an Open Education board game and the intriguing sounding “An Archivist goes to the Playground – Exploring and Describing Chicago Park Playgrounds” as well as “Improvising the future of digital storytelling”
- I am excited to read “My website is a junk drawer” and also “Lessons from Rewilding Landscapes… in the Wild”
In short, there is not much of the three days I am not looking forward to. And of course there’s also the people to connect with, to chat and share inspiration.

My session (is a blog post)

As I am mainly working with the team delivering the conference I didn’t want to present live as well. Luckily the first day of the conference is in a new format, a blog-a-thon, and so I made a submission in the form of a blog post for that instead. If you are wondering what’s involved, here is an explainer to get you started – but one of the joys of working with the team and trying out new things is that whilst we do have a plan, we don’t exactly know all the details up front and there’s a certain level of winging it involved 😉

I decided to submit a blog post about blogging (of course), specifically about blogging as a superpower in professional practice. My session will be on 4 November and you should check out the full schedule to explore keynote speakers, as well as other presenters and bloggers.

Join in!

Register now to join in, November 4-6, as this wonderful community comes together on the open web, via federated social networks, on the radio and on a blog near you. This is one event you don’t want to miss.
22/10/2025
Conferencing at the cutting edge

Organising conferences is my guilty professional pleasure… . I fell into doing it at various times throughout my career and I thoroughly enjoy it. I like the preparations, the run up and the excitement of delivering an event, whether it’s for several hundred people in a hushed auditorium or a buzzy online crowd with run-away chatter and endless DMs.

Last year I had an absolute blast working on the DS106 Summer Camp with Jim Groom and his team at Reclaim, and we had the MOST fun delivering a radio based conference. So when this year’s plans for Reclaim Open came along, I jumped at the chance to work together again to re-invent the conference yet again.

What’s in store

Reclaim Open’s theme this year, brought to life by the one and only Bryan Mathers is Rewilding the Network – Making New Connections and the conference will take place fully online, so there’s no travel required 🙂

The event covers three days, from 4-6th November, and registration is now open. Register to attend before September 1, 2025 and get a 33% ‘early bird’ discount, making the conference fee a very affordable $99.

Make a submission and get involved

For Reclaim Open, every proposal is also a blog post. We will publish all accepted submissions on the conference blog which will also be the conference schedule. Submissions are now open for the following session streams:

Your Voice: how do educators and students find and amplify their voices on the open web? How do we make ourselves heard and what are the risks and opportunities in Higher Ed and beyond?

Your World: Maybe it’s a blog or a domain of one’s own that is your home in the digital realm. Whether it’s all business or rather hobbies, pets, creative projects, parenting or sports. Share what you care about on the open web.

The Tech: the technology that makes it all possible, from open source platforms like WordPress and Ghost, to open infrastructure hosted on ReclaimEDU, this theme is for sharing tech know-how and geeky pursuits.

The Connections: What brings us together in a world of fragmented social networks and how do you stay connected and find new connections? From self-hosted socials to federated networks, we want to hear about how you make connections.

The Wildcard: Share your inspiration and creativity. Wild is wonderful.

There will be radio!

One of the things I am most looking forward to is the Reclaim Open Blog-A-Thon, a wild mix of radio and blogging fun on the first day of the event. If you are curious what this is all about, read on:

How it all began

It all started at the beginning of this year when a few brave souls got together to found Bloggers Anonymous, Reclaim’s Community of Practice for Bloggers in Higher Ed. It started small, with a dedicated channel on Discord, and a monthly meeting. A few of us got to together to talk about blogging, and blog about blogging… and before we knew it the RSS feed that folk were adding their blogs to was pinging with the sound of fresh blog posts, hot off the press. If you’d like to find out more about this Community of Practice, check out the story so far over on the Reclaim Blog.

So what’s the Blog-A-Thon?

Now, the Blog-A-Thon is on November 4th, the first day of the conference, and the idea is that we’re going to take to our blogs to read, respond and connect. You’ll be able to find and navigate between the posts via the conference schedule, and post your comments

We’re also planning for some good old-fashioned radio coming to you live with bloggers chatting about blogging and playing the soundtrack to their stories.

If that’s made you curious, head over to the conference site to learn more, and make your submission!

28/07/2025
Critical Digital Capabilities for Leaders in Hybrid Higher Education
I recently took part in a leadership development programme, Leadership in Higher Education and Artificial Intelligence: A New Paradigm. The programme was designed with an international cohort in mind, and it was great fun to work with leaders from across different countries and from a whole range of Higher Education institutions.

Snapshot of me during the presentation and the audience (Source: LinkedIn Post)

My session was inspired by Global Trends Towards Flexible, Hybrid Working and its Impact for Digital Leadership in Higher Education, a report commissioned by the N-TUTORR National Digital Leadership Network, and which was just publisher earlier this year. It was a great opportunity to share some of the key recommendations that came out of this work and to begin to unpack how these may be implemented.

This is a complex topic, and there was a lot packed into the talk, so I broke it down into three sections:
- developing leadership capabilities in critical digital and date literacies, with a focus on frameworks that reflect changing practices in the AI-enabled workplace (or classroom);
- enhancing leadership skills for hybrid working (and learning) in Higher Education, emphasising the central importance of building trust and balancing the overlap between professional and personal;
- finding inspiration at a time when everyone is already overworked and under-resourced, opening up a perspective beyond the current hype cycle.
Given that we ourselves were experiencing Oxford’s city centre in heatwave conditions, I can only applaud the delegation’s energy and interest in engaging with these topics on the final day of their busy programme’s week and before lunch, as well. We had lively discussions which only served to highlight to me how widely our experiences, practices and policies around hybrid working futures vary. And it gave me much food for thought about what else I would like to include in the research for the book I’m writing on.

A big thank you also to the organisers for making me feel so welcome, and for bringing together a really interesting group of people! If you’d like to learn more, explore my session slides.
14/07/2025
From OER25 to Reclaim Open 25

This year, sadly, is the first time in a long time that I’ll be missing out on the OER Conference. I have blogged (a lot) about this very special event before, including a literal love letter to the conference in 2023, and a postcard from OER24 in Cork last year.

The line up for OER25 looks fabulous, headed up by two wonderful Co-Chairs, Louise Drumm and Sheila MacNeill, and tantalising keynotes Helen Beetham and Joe Wilson. I would have loved to go to London and join in the fun. Unfortunately some long-standing work commitments mean that I can’t travel… so instead I’ll be following the conference chat online.

Travel being a little restricted doesn’t mean however that I’ll be missing out on all open educational technology conference fun this year, thanks to being involved in Reclaim Open, set to return in November!

In the past I’ve not been able to attend Reclaim’s flagship conference in person, but this year it’s happening entirely on the web, on blogs and on the radio, so there’s no need to travel at all to take part.

I love the retro theme, the look and feel that Bryan Mathers has created for the event, and I am excited about the blogging! It’s an awesome opportunity for the Blogging Community of Practice to get active in the event, too.

For Reclaim Open, every proposal is a blog post and all accepted submissions on the conference blog which will also be the conference schedule. So, this week submissions are opening, so it’s time to get thinking and writing… and put in a proposal. 1… 2…. 3…. Blog!

12/06/2025
Keynote: From Analogue to AI

Keynote invitations don’t come much more fun that the one I was excited to accept for this week: the Open University’s annual conference for its community of associate lecturers and other staff. When I first got the email, I knew I made to make it happen because these are the people I love to work with most!

This conference, which attracts close to 500 participants and covers two days (in May and June respectively), is a rare opportunity for a very distributed workforce to come together around topic of common interest, which, inevitably, includes AI this year.

My keynote takes a big picture approach at learning and working and everything in between, and also zooms in on deeply practical approaches to using technology, from analogue to AI. The full title of the talk is Reclaiming the Pace of Digital Productivity in the Age of AI and you can view the full slide deck .

It gives me an opportunity to sign-post the work of some recent special guests that have featured on my podcast, starting with the Digital and AI Literacies work by Angela Gunder, which really inspired me:

These Dimensions of AI Literacies were remixed from the work of Doug Belshaw’s Essential Elements of Digital Literacies, whom I was fortunate to speak to recently as well:

Between these two conversations you’ll get a real flavour of what my keynote is all about. Angela and Doug are really worth listening to – and I am grateful that I was able to speak to them about their work which in turned inspired me when I was writing the keynote.

Lastly, looking ahead into the future of education, beyond AI even, I included some of the voices I discovered earlier this year when I was in Dublin, for Education after the algorithm: Co-designing critical and creative futures. The event was a symposium for thinking otherwise about critical AI and post-AI pedagogies of higher education as part of the Erasmus+ Hacking Innovative Pedagogies: Digital Learning Rewilded (opens in a new tab) project,c haired by Eamon Costello and featured a wonderful keynote by Helen Beetham.

I talked about walking, both literally and metaphorically, in my session Critical Cadence, and I hope to be able to share some of the hope and inspiration I gathered at this event with the audience in my keynote, offering some energy and joy at the business end of a very busy academic year.

11/06/2025