Maren Deepwell

Category: open practice

  • A day in the life of a #femedtech guest curator

    Me, remixed with The Fabulous Remixer Machine

    It’s my second time to volunteer as a guest curator for the @femedtech Twitter account and in the past year, since my last time as a curator, much has changed.

    In 2018, I followed Helen Beetham, being only the second person to try out how to be a guest curator. At the time, the account had 122 followers, had tweeted about the same number of tweets and we were just in the process of writing some guidance for the activity, making it up as we went along and learning from the wonderful examples of networks around us. Frances Bell contributed the slide below to the community-sourced slides for International Women’s Day 2019.

    So what is it like to be a guest curator now, that the following is ten times bigger and the network is growing rapidly, organising activities around events and interests?

    I start each day by checking in with the account, checking first on the notifications and new followers. Following back those who are new and welcoming them is one of the key things I try to do each day. It’s fascinating to see who follows the account and often I come across individuals and accounts I also want to connect with in my personal capacity.

    Then I look for new tweets that have been tagged with the hashtag #femedtech and like or retweet those. This can open up quite a few new rabbit holes down which my time disappears as I find a new book, artist or research that I want to learn more about. In contract to my own Twitter world, there is a much more varied and unexpected range of things being posted. Here are some examples from recent days:

    You can see, there is a really varied range of things being posted, so I strongly recommend you follow the account yourself and join in.

    Then, each day, I try and find and contribute something new, something from my own network or frame of reference, and which I can share to enrich the conversation or open it up to include new accounts. So this week I posted:

    And I also work to communicate from what the network does in my day job, for example this week I had the opportunity to speak at the 13th Research and Innovation in Distance Education, and eLearning (RIDE) annual conference  and I included a section on promoting equality in my talk, specifically focused on new analysis my colleague Martin Hawksey did of ALT’s Annual Survey focused on comparing gender perspectives, and his related post makes for interesting reading.

    Being a guest curator for the #femedtech network really opens up new perspectives for me, it helps me get into the mindset of being a volunteer (and my day job relies heavily on the goodwill of volunteers, so that is particularly helpful for me) and it’s a powerful reminder that whilst we are making a lot of progress, there is always so much more to do to create a more equal and equitable society.

    And on that note I’d like to mention a last opportunity to make your voice heard, to join in the conversation, which is a new open space for femedtech created in the run up to the OER19 conference. You can read all about it here and consider the following questions:

    • How do we balance privacy, openness and personal ethics?
    • How do we mediate our place in the open community, aspects of which might conflict with our personal ethics?
    • Is openness an act of conformance and / or defiance? And are there performative aspects to openness?
    • Do we feel pressured to be more open than we are comfortable with, or do our boundaries constrain us?
    • How do we manage sustainable spaces for exploring challenging issues around open?

  • Virtual Team outtakes: tools, superstructures and keep asking ‘why’?!

    I really appreciate following the work of Alice Keeler (@alicekeeler) on Twitter. I learn something new from her every week and find the tips and ideas being shared extremely accessible and easy to use. So when I saw this tweet recenlyt, proclaiming “I WANT my tech tools to become OBSOLETE” I sat back and paused – because I was just in the process of spending a few hours making one of the tools I use at work obsolete and it felt like a good point to remind myself why that is a good thing.

    When we wrote about cpd and digital well being for our series on leading virtual teams, Martin Hawksey and I talked about how important it is to revisit our relationship with technology as personal habits change and professional practice develops. And I mentioned some of the more frustrating aspects of constant iteration, of ‘agile’ approaches to developing software and hardware. What we didn’t get around to talking about is what Alice’s post picks up on, the opportunity to start from scratch, with a blank slate, to improve, to re-imagine – rather than to simply edit or update. Alice’s post reminded me that it’s sometimes good when platforms or tools change because we are then forced to take a fresh look at what we are doing and why. But some processes that I work on are so fundamental, so much part of the fabric of my working world, that there’s rarely an external prompt to start from scratch.

    The structures that shape workflows, processes, thinking… usually they are either complex and technologically challenging, in which case I need others to actually do the re-imagining with and for me, or they are very simple and tend to disappear into the foundation. This second category is rarely rocked by obsolescence. As tools go, spreadsheets and documents, in one form or another, don’t often change dramatically enough to really make you take a fresh look at things. So this time I am going to not focus on the ‘how’ but the ‘why’. What do I need this to do? Why is it being produced? Why is it being read? Why is it important to know? Or is it?

    It’s a good thing to do, to take a fresh look at something and consider how it could do better. How it could be more efficient. Or more engaging. More transparent. More impactful. How it could be cheaper or more expensive. How it could be more fun, more enjoyable, more rewarding. And whether you need it in the first place. Does it still serve a purpose?

    I am not a great fan of doing things because they have been done before. Or of doing things in a certain way simply because that’s how it was done before. That’s not a good enough reason. I always want to know why. Why, why, WHY???

    There are some problems with this approach: you don’t have the comfort of accepting things as they are (and that is not to be underestimated), you can waste time and effort on something that is not worth it, you need to make sure you don’t change things for the sake of it and it’s a lot more work to constantly trying to improve everything than to simply repeat it.

    There are much bigger upsides (for me): it’s not boring. You develop judgement. You can achieve more (I think). It’s fun learning new things all the time. You get to re-invent the structures that determine the shape of your work.

    When I was a research student, I worked part-time in my department’s archive. A small collection of materials that students could borrow from a room filled with book cases and filing cabinets. I worked there for two years and left a new cataloguing system, the first complete catalogue, a new lending process and loans up by 100% when I left. A few hours a week sitting in a small, boring office where activity was not at all incentivised presented an opportunity for me to reinvent things from the ground up. Given time, space and a particular problem, I had enough freedom to… make things change. It never occurred to me to ask for permission.

    And that’s why I liked that post from Alice and her thinking about changes in tools and platforms as opportunities to ask ‘why’? Any catalyst that get’s us to ask that question, to reflect on our work and our aims and the underlying systems, the assumptions is to be welcomed. Not ‘just’ for teachers, but for each of us.

    If you have missed it, go back and read the most recent post on leading a virtual team.

  • Looking for contributions: #femedtech slide deck for International Women’s Day 2019

    #femedtech #oer18
    #femedtech #oer18

    It’s not long before International Women’s Day on 8 March and whilst the work of the #femedtech network is not all about women, but about greater equality for everyone, the day is a great opportunity for us to share the work we do, spread the message and reach new supporters.

    Like many of you, I’m looking forward to sharing ideas, inspiration and some hard hitting facts when I talk about #femedtech and so I am looking for contributions to a shared slide deck – shared with everyone and free to use for you all.

    Please contribute something if you can, make a slide or more than one, adding images, quotes, references, figures or ideas that may help us better share the work we do and the things we care about. All contributions should be suitable for CC-BY sharing and include attribution.

    Thank you!

  • Working with greater kindness: how to take a break from being the worst critic of your own professional practice.

    Recently I’ve started to form a new habit, to give myself a break each day for something I’ve done or something I haven’t done. It was a kind of afterthought on a list of things, the sort of list you make at the start of the year, when the days are dark and you feel like turning over a new leaf.

    Yet, it’s been a surprisingly impactful exercise, prompting quite a few realisations about how I work:

    Being too self critical?! 

    The ease with which I find something each day made me realise that I’m more self critical than I’d thought. Having a regular reminder to give myself a break has made me take a kinder view.

    Perspective

    Often things that turn days from good to bad are quite small. Still, they can have a real impact on how I perceive things to have gone. Taking one thing out of the equation often makes things a lot better. In retrospect that is particularly helpful – focusing on good things, rather than small, but annoying niggles.

    Giving others a break

    Giving myself a break makes it much easier to do the same for others, I find. It stops me from getting distracted by minor issues, gives me more headspace to focus on what’s important. 

    Being my own mentor

    In the past, my mentor would have been the person who would remind me most often to give myself a break. It was liberating to hear and often cheered me up. Now I find reminding myself works, too. It still has the same effect. 

    Reflecting on failure

    It’s more difficult to reflect on failure than success, partly because of the emotional element. I may feel bad about a decision I made or a particular action I took and that makes me feel less comfortable, less able to think clearly about how I could have done better or what I would do differently next time. It also makes it harder to talk to others about it, because I may get defensive or focus on how I feel rather than listening. In this context giving myself a break, forgiving myself for mistakes I’ve made, is really important. It helps me to move on, to better learn from what I did or didn’t do. 

    How to… give yourself a break

    What works for me is to take a moment late in the day and think about how things have gone. Often one thing stands out as being annoying, something I wish I had done differently or something I wish I hadn’t said. It’s quite rare for nothing to come to mind. If they are too many things, I focus on whatever I feel most angry or annoyed about. Then, I take whatever it is, I acknowledge it, and give myself a break for whatever it may be. Sometimes that feels a bit like putting it in my own personal Room 101, sometimes it’s like putting it in the bin, sometimes it feels like letting go. 

    I know it’s happened, and I may have many more thoughts or feelings about my day but that one thing is now ok. Phew. 

    I found it’s much more effective than I’d expected. Maybe it’ll work for you, too.

  • 2018: my year in open practice and collaboration

    Snapshots of collaborations in 2018

    It’s been interesting to reflect on the year in Learning Technology (previous post) and that has brought about the realisation that much of what I have done this year has been in open practice and collaboration (and all the better for it!). It’s also brought about another blog post… 🙂

    Some of the work has been around governance and policy, for example in collaboration with Lorna Campbell, Martin Weller and Joe Wilson we produced a policy paper for ALT on openness in education. Since the paper was published I have been working to disseminate this call to action and one such effort was a recent post on Wonke, entitled Openness in education: a call to action for policy makers, with Lorna Campbell which was published on International Women’s Day. In the post, we examine the practical recommendations from the policy paper, how they could be implemented and discuss what policy makers could do to realise the benefits of openness in education in different sectors in the UK. 

    2017: What we have been up to [Image credit: Bryan Mathers]
    2017: What we have been up to [Image credit: Bryan Mathers]

    Or together with the Chair of ALT, Sheila MacNeill,  I wrote a Joint Report on strategic progress, 1 Feb 2018 – and we continue to publish minutes from Board meetings alongside all our governance information.  Open governance is one of the most interesting areas of work and I have been particularly enjoying talking to other membership bodies like UCISA, ILTA and ETUG about their approach or sharing expertise in groups like ALT’s strategic working group for our journal Research in Learning Technology (some of which I shared in this Gasta at EdTech2018). 

    Collaboration beyond my #altc colleagues led to this collaborative project, about how Learning Technology professionals and start-ups can work together. It started with a blog post call to action written jointly by Anders Krohn, CEO of Aula and myself, and led to a series of consultation sessions with academics, technologists and innovators, resulting in contributions to the first version of the Edtech start up guide, which was published early in 2018. Anders and I then followed up with a second blog post on the altc blog, including a contribution from Peter Bryant, LSE, to launch the guide, share some of the case studies and lessons learnt we collated and to look ahead at future work with start ups on the guide and in the community.

    My mentor, Margaret, and me, 2016

    And also, later this year, as part of my commitment to an open approach to leadership, I’ve asked my mentor Margaret to collaborate with me on a three part series to share our insights into being a mentor and what it’s like to have one. This project turned out to be much more intense than I had first anticipated and reminded me that even with experience sharing practice openly can be really challenging. We focused on different aspects of mentoring, reflecting on what it takes to get through tough times, how we built a blended approach to mentoring and the real benefits of having a mentor. 

    One of my favourite networks to collaborate with this year has been the growing #femedtech community and I have been advocating for the network at every opportunity at events  as well as volunteering as a guest curator of the @femedtech Twitter account. Promoting equality in all its forms in Learning Technology is one of the most rewarding aspects of my work and there is always SO MUCH more to do. 
    I also set up a TAGS Twitter archive and TAGSExplorer for the #femedtech hashtag, to help chart and visualise the conversation as it evolves:

    TAGSExplorer #femedtech

    This year I have published 30 blog posts on my blog and about half of these this year have been chronicling how my colleague Martin Hawksey and I have led ALT through its transition to becoming a distributed organisation and establishing a new working culture as a virtual staff team. Our monthly series of posts has been at the heart of all my work this year, touching on everything from people management and well being at work to the technical challenges of remote working and the nuances of working in the open. Writing these posts whilst everything is actually happening, rather than sharing output from work that is in the past, felt far more scary than similar kinds of work I had done before. 

    There is much of what I do day to day that I hadn’t managed to make part of my open practice before this collaboration – leadership, management… these are not the most straight forward topics to share (especially when you are everyone’s ‘boss’). It feels easier to share ideas, innovations, practical things others can use or read up on. Sharing how we lead a team is a completely different proposition and I am glad that following Martin’s initial prompt I have taken up the challenge to create an open approach to share and reflect regularly. In previous years I have blogged about it… this year it feels like I am actually DOING it. 

    It’s also taught me much about the value of collaboration itself, about really leveraging what each person brings to the table and to create something that goes beyond anything that could have been created on an individual basis – and that, I am particularly grateful for. 

    On that note of gratitude to ALL of my collaborators this year, I am going to end this post and make plans for 2019… . 

  • Virtual Team outtakes: Smartwatch & homeworking

    In our most recent post on leading a virtual team Martin and I talked about the upsides of remote working and many of the comments we received highlighted ways in which people find balance between the demands of home and family life and work. That got me thinking about what makes a real difference to me day to day and took me back to contributing to David Hopkins’ Edtech Rations book, in which we shared what the most important things are, those you don’t leave home without. But when you don’t really leave home to work, what is it that makes the difference when you work from home?

    Martin mentioned wearables in the post and that prompted me to think about how I use my smartwatch when I work from home. I do have concerns about the way the watch can track so much of my activity and I have switched off some more advanced/sharing functionality because of it, but there are certain things it can do that I find really helpful:

    Alarm clock: When charging and put on its side, the watch is a great alarm clock and I use it both at home and when I travel. It’s motion sensitive so the display only comes on when needed, which I like. It shows you the time your alarm is set for and it starts to get brighter as that time approaches, helping you to wake up. All of that could easily be accomplished with a regular alarm clock of course, but I like that I can make use of the watch when I am not wearing it and travel with it without having to carry along another bulky item of technology. It also means that I can leave my phone out of reach but I can still check the time. 

    Move reminder: another aspect of the watch I really like is that you can opt in to it reminding you to move if you have sat still 50 min of the hour. Whilst I have other reminders to move, like wanting a cup of tea, or the phone ringing or a delivery arriving, this function really helps me on days when I have a lot of work to get through. It reminds me to take a break from staring at the screens as well. On a long journey it’s not always possible to take a break, but I find long train journeys much more comfortable when I move about a little regularly. With enough awareness and self discipline there is no reason why one shouldn’t naturally take breaks regularly, but I don’t always have that when I get lost in a complicated piece of work.

    Phone system: our phone system puts calls through on my computer as well as my mobile phone during work hours (I have chosen for it to do that, it’s not required). However, I am not always at my desk and I don’t always want to carry around my mobile phone either. So glancing at my watch when the phone rings gives me the chance to check whether it’s a work call or a personal call. I can answer the call on the watch, but I rarely do.

    Planning time to go running: there is one other way in which I use the watch during the week, particularly in the colder months when it gets dark early and is cold in the mornings. I set the watch to display the temperature and the time the sun sets, helping me decide when to best find time to go for a run. I don’t run every day, but for my work life balance to work I want to be heading outside once or twice during the week, and I find it frustrating to forget, finish work and realise it’s nearly dark. So having a way to remind myself of what time the sun will set (provided that it is shining to begin with) is a useful way of planning the end of my working day and I have the flexibility to finish an hour early to catch the last bit of daylight.