A couple of weeks of spending long days online and working hard have prompted me to embark on this year’s digital detox. The last one I did was in November 2020 and focused on the Data Detox Kit.
Since I tried out the kit, there has been a new addition, HOW MANY TREES DOES IT TAKE TO POWER THE INTERNET? which definitely looks worth checking out.
In 2018 my digital detox focused on my digital shadow, and I learnt a lot through the process.
This time, I am going to focus on an approach for wellbeing for my physical rather than my digital self.
Unsubscribe
The first two tasks are:
Monday: Switch push notifications off
Tuesday: Unsubscribe from mailing lists, chat groups, facebook groups etc
I found both of these useful reminders to check in with what I am actually doing v what I think I am doing. For example, I think I have all notifications switched off, but a few new apps have sneaked in.
Similarly, a number of apps for projects, conferences, a particular friend etc have started to appear and once they are on my phone, I use them. So I deleted all work-related ones.
Email
I don’t have work emails on my phone and I already refresh manually, so Wednesday’s task is easy. Checking my emails late in the day is less easy. Similarly, I think I rarely use my phone at the dinner table, but actually leaving it in the hallway is a reminder that even here picking it up to check something can sneak in. So Thursday is all about leaving the phone in a different room during mealtimes.
I find that hard during breakfast.
Switching off
The next task, for Friday, is to switch off all devices 90 min before bedtime. It’s been interesting for me to reflect how I do use my devices before bed, particularly as I am a big fan of listening to audio books as I fall asleep. One suggestion I found useful is to enable airplane mode instead of switching the phone off all together.
Pausing (work) emails until Monday morning is another suggestion I might be trying out – although I rarely check work emails at the weekend anyway.
Social Media free weekend
The task for the weekend is to start building in 1 hour periods during which you are without a device and then to expand those to eventually include a whole day. One bit of the advice that chimed with me was to enjoy moments and not post them on social media.
I have done that a lot over the past two years, first prompted by a lot of personal upheaval during a time of divorce, moving house and then lockdown, but also for holidays. I probably still take pictures as I love doing that, but not post them.
This past month has been BUSY. I am good under pressure, but it took a lot of energy and effort to keep things in some sort of resemblance of balance this month.
ALT is always busy in August, because we run our biggest event of the year in September, and it has keep us all working hard. It’ll be worth it when we see it coming together in just over two weeks. If you haven’t already registered, I’d encourage you to join us (and applications for scholarship places remain open, too).
I am looking forward to us convening as a community. Hundreds of participants and speakers, many of whom I know. It will be good to reconnect after what has been quite an isolated year.
Here is a quick run down of what I’ve been up to other than conference prep:
I made a terrarium
Blasus Terrarium Workshop
Thanks for a wonderful independent plant shop, I was able to join a “make your own” terrarium last week. It’s a succulent terrarium, my favourite kind of plant.
It was a great way to do a local activity and go somewhere new – plus, there is now a beautiful new terrarium next to my desk.
Blogging
I blogged quite a bit this month (for me).
JOINING CONVERSATIONS FOR EQUALITY, DIVERSITY, INCLUSION & BELONGING: I recently joined the anti-racism & learning technology group. I am particularly interested in the mentoring and coaching area and also recruitment. I am currently in the process of recruiting for a member of staff and post no. 3 is very relevant to me, encouraging us to ‘disrupt the current procedures in place, and to ensure that we can action diversity rather than pay lip service to racism issues in the sector’.
WE ARE LOOKING FOR A COO… A LOOK BEHIND THE RECRUITMENT DOORS: We are currently recruiting for a Chief Operations Officer for ALT, and I couldn’t be more excited! Now we are planning ahead for post-pandemic times. Whilst we have an excellent track record delivering online activities and a lot of expertise in virtual events, we don’t just want to follow our old ways. Instead, we are starting to innovate and that has helped us redistribute our income streams and ensured that we are back to generating the charitable income we need to achieve our mission. Next, we are looking to develop blended ways of doing things and improving what we are already good at. In order to achieve that, we have created a new role and are looking to grow our staff team… .
MAKING TIME FOR CPD IN A LEARNING TECHNOLOGY LEADERSHIP ROLE: In the past year it’s been hard to make much time for professional development, or at least the kind of professional development you can plan. Like many in my position, I had a huge amount of professional development focused on keeping my organisation running in a crisis, emergency governance, financial crisis management and so forth. Things are STILL extremely busy, and look like they will continue to be for some time to come, but I am making time do actually plan some CPD beyond giving talks and attending (virtual) conferences.
POSEIDON, BIN COLLECTOR, JUDGE. WHAT I WANTED TO BE WHEN I WAS A KID: When things are busy, it can be tough to make time and space for YOU. So in order to make some space for ME on MY blog, this is a blog post all about… me ?. Reflecting on ‘career’ progress for want of a better word is an important part of charting your own development, and this is something I have been doing as part of reviewing and updating my Senior CMALT Portfolio. The time frame for updating the portfolio is the last 3 years… but what we I look back 30+ years instead?
Book progress
I have been working on Chapter 3. This includes some of the most interesting sections relating to Learning Technology and Open Education, in particular a section on open approaches to leadership.
The chapter was harder to write because I had a lot of things I wanted to refer to which would be covered in other parts of the book, which don’t exist yet. On the plus side, I have managed to get into a good routine with my writing, and I found a regular writing (half) day, which helps a lot.
We are currently recruiting for a Chief Operations Officer for ALT, and I couldn’t be more excited!
It’s always great when you get to grow your team, particularly when there are only seven of you and each individual makes a big impact.
Why this role, why now?
We are the leading professional body for Learning Technology in the UK – and we have been pretty busy in the past eighteen months! Learning Technology has never been more in demand and as a consequence the work we do to support our growing community has increased month on month.
After a year of supporting our Members through the global crisis, we have re-grouped and set out a strategic plan for the year ahead. 2020 was a tough year for us an independent charity as we traditionally generate half of our annual turnover from two face to face events. Thanks to our prudent financial strategy in past years, we had reserves to help us through times of crisis.
Now we are planning ahead for post-pandemic times. Whilst we have an excellent track record delivering online activities and a lot of expertise in virtual events, we don’t just want to follow our old ways. Instead, we are starting to innovate and that has helped us redistribute our income streams and ensured that we are back to generating the charitable income we need to achieve our mission. Next, we are looking to develop blended ways of doing things and improving what we are already good at.
In order to achieve that, we have created a new role and are looking to grow our staff team:
The Chief Operations Officer (COO) is responsible for day-to-day operation of ALT, including technical infrastructure and systems used to deliver ALT’s services to 3,500 Members. The COO acts as the Deputy for the Chief Executive and represents and advocates for ALT with our key stakeholders across sectors.
This is an opportunity to see projects through from conception to completion and play a part in shaping how we work and what we do. You will be reporting directly to and working closely with ALT’s CEO and have opportunities to develop your own skills in running an organisation in an innovative and human way.
https://www.alt.ac.uk/about-alt/work-us
If that sounds like the kind of work you would enjoy, read on.
For the past few months it’s been all ladies working in the team, and we are making a real effort to recruit the best candidates for each job whilst increasing the diversity of our team, which is a big priority for us (all recruitment and selection is undertaken in line with ALT’s aims and values and in accordance with ALT’s policy on equality and diversity).
As it stands, we are based in three of the four nations in the UK; three of our team, that is 42%, are currently completing a PhD (and one of us already has hers) and over 40% of the team are either Certified Members of ALT or currently working towards their accreditation.
As far as I know we have 5 cats and 5 dogs between us, and come Friday plenty of unicorns, too (Fridays we usually celebrate ‘unicorn’ day, a tradition even those of us who are not generally into things that are pink and fluffy have come to appreciate).
We have a real range of backgrounds and have a former chartered surveyor as well as an expert in Victorian cemeteries in the team. As many of us work part-time, mostly 3 and 4 days a week, it’s quite common for us to have other responsibilities to focus on, be that studies, kids or other interests.
If you’d like to find out what it is like for us working as a virtual team, read our blog post from earlier this year, celebrating three years as home-workers. Find out what our highlights and lowlights of pandemic working have been and how we thrive as a virtual team.
When I first started working for ALT, as an Assistant Administrator (Maternity Cover) in 2008, I was just finishing my PhD and I had no inkling that a career in Learning Technology was ahead of me. As it turns out, the field has proven so interesting and challenging that I find always something new to do and to learn.
The senior team of a small organisation is an exciting place to be. I love the freedom it gives me to make things happen, to be able to respond to the changing needs of our community without having a complicated hierarchy to negotiate. We believe in robust and transparent governance, and we get things done.
I am proud to be part of a journey that has seen the size of our membership double several times since 2008, and writing our Impact Report 2021 has reminded me of how much we achieve as an organisation and as a team. For me it’s an exciting place to be with a good dollop of life/work balance and a team culture we all benefit from.
Working for an independent charity with a staff team of fewer than ten people is a very different value proposition than working for a large institution such as a university or a commercial organisation with thousands of employees. For me, it’s a rewarding leadership position that allows me to practice what I preach 🙂
Not a working day… looking out over Cardiff countryside
Find out more
If you are interested to find out more, head over to the ALT website or contact me for an informal conversation.
Apply by sending us your covering letter and your CV by 17 September 2021.
All candidates will be notified after the initial short-listing by the end of September and short-listed candidates will be invited to online interviews in October.
I recently joined the anti-racism & learning technology group. If you’d like to learn more about the work of the group, there is a series of blog posts on the #altc blog which provide a great starting point:
The AR<CoP has been meeting since November 2020 to address these challenges and currently encompasses three areas of activity:
Guidance for Content Developers. The focus of this area of activity is to create a set of recommendations to incorporate anti-racism in digital learning content.
Research Connected Activities. Research, seminars and advances in the field of digital education are covered in this area. For example, diversity and digital leadership, and the influence of biases in Artificial Intelligence and machine learning.
Mentoring & Coaching. This area of activity aims at creating connections between colleagues who wish to support and receive support for career advancement and managing the complexities of an increasingly fast-changing work environment.
I am particularly interested in the mentoring and coaching area and also recruitment. I am currently in the process of recruiting for a member of staff and post no. 3 is very relevant to me, encouraging us to ‘disrupt the current procedures in place, and to ensure that we can action diversity rather than pay lip service to racism issues in the sector’. Specifically, looking at:
Gender empowerment and more diverse students/staff pool
Unequal pay between white staff and other ethnicities
Demographics of the UK and the geographical locations of applicants
Reflections
The first meeting I was able to join in with was on 29 July, and this introduced Bold Conversations for Equality, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging – activities planned for the autumn term. I really appreciate the opportunity to join the group’s discussions and the opportunity to educate myself, challenge my ideas and blind spots.
The main part of the session was about setting up circles for discussion and coaching each other, offering safe spaces for mindful listening and voicing issues around the core areas of activities. I found it really interesting to hear and listen to the approach modelled here and how it reflects the values of the group.
It was good to learn about a particular strand of work of the wider group, and I am particularly interested in the coaching approach used.
Come the new autumn, I am looking forward to being more actively involved in the work of the group and I am grateful to the inspiring group facilitators for moving this forward.
I was on a long awaited break at the end of June and I missed out blogging about what I did in June… and so you get double the monthly blogging goodness in one post 🙂
First up… CEO updates
Things were BUSY for me as a CEO in June, as I wrote in my report to Members of ALT. Not only did we hold our AGM, announced new Trustee appointments and a Board meeting all in the same week, but we also launched our Impact Report, which I am really proud of:
A page from the ALT Impact Report 2021
That was my week of the year to hit all the big annual milestones and I am glad to say that the feedback was excellent. After the year we and everyone in Learning Technology has had, it means a lot to me that I have contributed to turning things around for us. We are once again on an upward trajectory, and as an independent charity we have weathered the crisis, for now at least. That is a great achievement as a CEO and for my whole team.
We also shared the consultation response to the draft ethical framework we are developing and this is a project very close to my heart. We conducted an open consultation from 7 May – 9 June 2021 and received 165 responses – thank you! The consultation asked for feedback and input about different elements of the framework:
Ethical principles for professional practice in Learning Technology
Putting principles into action – reflective practice, practical tools and a checklist
Work is now underway to create the resources which will launch in September. Speaking of September…
There is also a very exciting (and online first) ALT Annual Conference on the horizon…! Even after running a whopping 157 online events in the past year with over 5,000 participants in total, we prepare for the Annual Conference somewhat differently. It’s our biggest event, our flagship conference, with a lot of history, and meaning for our community.
The kind of value we want to provide goes well beyond sharing solutions and disseminating findings. To me, and to many others, ALT’s Annual Conference is ‘not just another (online) conference’ but it is an opportunity to make plans, to connect to colleagues and to energise and mobilise your networks for the year ahead. That kind of energy and inspiration is much needed and precious. Here is a blog post sharing what I’m hoping for for #altc #altc21.
Lovely surprise early gift, card & tea from my @A_L_T Team for tomorrow. I love my work and really appreciate my fantastic #altc colleagues ? Now it’s time for a two week break from work?️ pic.twitter.com/ErPXWX63gH
I absolutely LOVED reading Where you are is not Who you are by Ursula Burns (thank you, Catherine, for the recommendation). It’s an awe inspiring and awesome read and really made me think about being a CEO in a new way. It was fantastic to read about the reflections of someone who has had a successful career as a principled leader.
Another great read from this past month has been Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo. And all the while, I was listening to DS106 Radio of course, and took part in the 24 hour marathong that Jim Groom organised to celebrated it’s 10 year 6 month (106) anniversary. You can read my love letter to emergency broadcasting here.
But. Most excitingly I have started to finally write the Leading a Virtual Teams Book and I am now two chapters into what I hope will be a year long writing project. And of course, you can read along:
Blog Post no. 2, which shared a bit of the first draft chapter
This month, I am writing Chapter 3: Leading a virtual team:
Is leading a virtual team very different from leading a team that is geographically co-located? This chapter explores what the reality of leading a virtual team is like for managers and leaders, reflecting on the ups and downs of leadership and sharing ideas for how to find your own virtual leadership style.
Exciting times and hopefully some useful output for everyone who finds themselves leading a virtual team.
Quick links
Key insights for 2021 – a presentation for Russel Group Universities IT Directors (RUGIT), 14 July 2021;
Developing ethical approaches to learning technology, a Fair Comment article, Common Wealth of Learning, July 2021;
ALT was founded in 1993 and last year was the first (and hopefully only) year in our history that we didn’t run our Annual Conference. Instead we organised a Summer Summit that provided much needed crisis support to our community in the run up to a start of term like no other.
This September, our Annual Conference is back, and the excitement is building under the leadership of our three wonderful Co-Chairs, Roger Emery, Farzana Latif and Matt Lingard, and their large and active Conference Committee, who have been blogging about the conference for the past months.
The response to the Call for Proposals was much larger than expected and we are just about to complete the second round of the peer review process with ~90 sessions accepted into the three day programme. That’s a LOT.
The theme of the conference this year is exploring Learning Technology through ‘Shared Experience, Different Perspectives’ with a specific focus on:
Leadership in learning technology
Inclusive practice
Digital well-being
Digital and physical spaces
Our small team and our large committee of volunteers are working together to make this the very best online conference that we can make it and I want to share my hopes for September with you:
We want our online events to be…
As an organisation we have ten years experience in running online events and that is a great asset for us. We learnt a whole lot more from running OERxDomains21 in partnership with Reclaim Hosting and we had such excellent feedback from the format that we are building on this to deliver this year’s Annual Conference.
Feedback for our online events from participants in 2020/21
But even after running a whopping 157 online events in the past year with over 5,000 participants in total, we prepare for the Annual Conference somewhat differently. It’s our biggest event, our flagship conference, with a lot of history, and meaning for our community.
The kind of value we want to provide goes well beyond sharing solutions and disseminating findings. To me, and to many others, ALT’s Annual Conference is ‘not just another (online) conference’ but it is an opportunity to make plans, to connect to colleagues and to energise and mobilise your networks for the year ahead. That kind of energy and inspiration is much needed and precious.
Flexibility built in
Many participants will have a lot of competing priorities in the same week that the conference is taking place. Protecting the time in which you attend a virtual event is hard and it’s become common practice to dip in and out for keynotes, the session where you are presenting and maybe one or two others. We have built in flexibility from the start, to help participants make the most of the event, including:
Sessions are available instantly to replay
A single dedicated resources channel which is accessible to all throughout the event and afterwards
Long breaks at the start, middle and end of the day and short breaks throughout the day
Wellbeing activities scheduled for quiet times and reflection
For our previous online events, this model worked well and we are adding extra tweaks to do justice to a huge programme over three days.
A different online space
We don’t use Zoom or Teams internally and we don’t use either for delivering our online events at the moment. Instead, we have created a different online space using a combination of tools. For some participants it will mean getting the hang of unfamiliar technology, but for many YouTube, Discord and an online conference programme will be familiar already.
I really relish the combination of individual chats, group channel chats and drop in spaces to accompany an online programme of live streamed sessions. If you are curious what it looks like in practice, looking back at what we did for OERxDomains21 on its programme and help pages.
The cost of online conferences
As an independent charity that used to generate 50% of its annual turnover from paid for face to face events, we have been thinking more than most about the cost of online events. The costs we incur (servers, technology, insurance, marketing, media production, staff time) and what’s affordable for participants.
For us, running online conference isn’t free, and we have to square our business objectives with our strategic priorities to supporting our Members and provide open access to much needed CPD, research and practice.
The conference costs £99 for speakers to attend, £129 for Members and includes both academic and social programmes, access to recourses and recordings and more.
We also offer scholarship places and we have awarded over 50 of them in the past year. We promote our scholarship places alongside registration and we encourage you to select the option best suited to your circumstances.
We also make resources and recordings from the conferences openly available after each event.
A conference with heart and difficult questions to tackle
One of the things we pride ourselves on is that this is a conference with heart. It’s organised by Members, we don’t sell the keynotes to sponsors (and we value the support of the sponsors we have who understand why that’s important and support our event year after year!) and we set aside time for tackling some of the difficult questions we face in Learning Technology.
Last year for example, Angela Saini led a Q&A session which gave participants the opportunity to explore questions such as what we mean when we say that race is a social construct, why racialised thinking persists in science and academia, and reflection on the BAME health disparities during the pandemic.
This year’s programme is going to prompt participants to think about the hard questions we are all coming up against as the use of Learning Technology is scaled up.
Kicking off proceedings this year will be Professor Sonia Livingstone, whose research examines how the changing conditions of mediation are reshaping everyday practices and possibilities for action. I have long been hoping to hear Sonia at one of our events, so I am particularly looking forward to this keynote.
Also very exciting is that we have Mutale Nkonde headlining the Wednesday of the conference week. AI For the People (AFP) is a communications firm, founded by Mutale Nkonde. AFP’s mission is to empower general audiences to combat racial bias in tech.
And alongside three outstanding keynotes there is also time for proper debate and reflection in three discussion sessions focused on:
Learner Experiences
Future Perspectives
Ethical approaches to professional practice in Learning Technology
The last of these sessions is dedicated to the launch of ALT’s new framework, which we have been working to develop since October 2020.
Three days, over a hundred speakers… it will be a very busy conference week in which we will pose questions as well as help find answers.
I hope to see you there, 7-9 September 2021 #altc #altc21.
Join the team
Would you like to be part of making such events happen? We are currently recruiting for a Chief Operations Officer.
