It’s been a joy to work on a new case study for Reclaim, this time featuring Ed Beck and his work on the SUNY Oneonta OpenLab. The case study is out now, and openly available, so you can have a read for yourself:
In this case study “Ed Beck shares insights into what it takes to move an open-source software solution from experiment to enterprise service. He also explores how to win the support of colleagues and secure the funding needed to build, scale, and future-proof such projects from the outset.”
It’s always interesting to hear Jim Groom’s interviews with pioneering practitioners such as Ed, and this conversation was no different: there was enough material to produce several case studies. Which is why we’re recording another interview with Ed, which is due to air very soon on Reclaim TV, this time taking a deeper dive into some of the themes that came out of the original conversation: namely how to win the support of colleagues and secure the funding needed to build, scale, and future-proof open source projects from the outset.
During the recent Open Education Week, I was reminded again and again how much scope there is to scale use of Open Source technologies and Open EdTech, and just how much advocacy and practical support is needed to continue to educate and empower edtech professionals to make that happen. With any luck, I’m hoping to talk more about this and similar projects at the upcoming ILTA Annual Conference in Dublin in June.
This week two of my favourite annual initiatives coincide: It’s Open Education Week, from 2-6 March, celebrating all things open in Education AND it’s also International Women’s Day on 8 March. Perfect timing to celebrate all things (and people!) inspiring in open education and beyond. As every year, I’m involved in a whole host of activities, and I look forward to connecting with you:
Online Events
I’m also taking part in two Open Education Week special events on Thursday and Friday this week with folks from OE Global and Reclaim! The first is a live conversation with a large panel of inspiring people on the topic of online communities hosted by Alan Levine 🙂
The second event is hosted by Reclaim “OEWeek on Reclaim TV: From Experiment to Enterprise Service” and focuses on a piece of work I am really excited about, namely a recent case study about how universities develop, scale and deploy open source educational services.
It’s easy! Go to https://listen.ds106rad.io/ and listen . Say hello, chat and enjoy the music. I will be monitoring the conversation via Bluesky and on Mastodon using the hashtag #ds106radio and I will be posting using the hashtags #ds106radio #oeweek26 and #IWD2026.
If you’d like to dedicate a song to something or someone who inspires you, in open education or beyond, then send me your request by responding to this post in the comments or reach out via Bluesky and on Mastodon.
Join me on air or DJ yourself
For any aspiring or established DS106 Radio DJs out there… get in touch if you fancy joining me on air OR if you are planning a broadcast that weekend, and are up for joining forces around a common theme.
From 6-8 March two of my favourite annual initiatives co-incide:
It’s Open Education Week, from 2-6 March, celebrating all things open in Education AND it’s also International Women’s Day on 8 March. Perfect timing to celebrate all things (and people!) inspiring in open education and beyond.
To celebrate in proper style, I am organising a schedule to jump on the DS106 Radio airwaves and bring you tunes over the weekend and I would love you to get involved. Here’s how:
Tune in and join in the conversation
It’s easy! Go to https://listen.ds106rad.io/ and listen 🙂 . Say hello, chat and enjoy the music. I will be monitoring the conversation via Bluesky and on Mastodon using the hashtag #ds106radio and I will be posting using the hashtags #ds106radio #oeweek26 and #IWD2026.
Dedicate a song
If you’d like to dedicate a song to something or someone who inspires you, in open education or beyond, then send me your request by responding to this post in the comments or reach out via Bluesky and on Mastodon.
Include the song title + artist, and who or what you’d like us to dedicate it to on air (including any links or tags you’d like us to post out). We won’t be tagging private accounts 🙂
Join me on air or DJ yourself
For any aspiring or established DS106 Radio DJs out there… get in touch if you fancy joining me on air OR if you are planning a broadcast that weekend, and are up for joining forces around a common theme.
Broadcastings schedule
There are some special guests waiting in the wings, and I will be adding to the schedule with more details soon. For now, my plan is to be on air each day as follows (subject to change and hopefully additions):
This week I have spent a lot of time on trains. Monday: Cardiff – Sheffield. Tuesday: Sheffield – Edinburgh. Wednesday: Edinburgh. Thursday: Edinburgh – Glasgow. Friday: Glasgow – Cardiff.
It’s been a joy to connect with colleagues and friends around the edges of a rewarding work trip and I made extra time to see more and connect with some of my favourite people who I haven’t seen in person for a long time. Work travel, when it’s not a weekly chore, turns out to be a lot more enjoyable when you can combine these different elements into one trip.
I used to travel a lot and was very used to working on the train, and this week reminded me of all the skills I don’t practice as frequently these days. Typing on my lap, tuning out the busy train, and getting things done before arriving at my destination for the day (although I must admit I am getting distracted as I am typing this, as outside the sun has come out momentarily and the beautiful and dramatic landscape of the Lake District is passing by my train window). It was good to be able to keep in touch with my work at Reclaim and complete some assessments whilst on the road.
Like the travel, in person meetings and facilitation was a really rewarding experience. It was a welcome contrast to much of my work online to connect, coach and communicate in person. The venues for work this week couldn’t have been more different: I visited the Edinburgh Futures Institute, and enjoyed use of a quiet study space to catch up on emails. It’s all tall ceilings, beautiful materials and unexpected views. It’s a lovely juxtaposition to the historic elements of the building and although it cost A LOT to build, it is clearly loved by the buzzing student population that has made a home here.
Outside view of a student space in the Edinburgh Futures Institute
My main work day, a day of leadership coaching and facilitation, took place in the spectacular St Leonard’s Hall, situation just at the foot of Arthur’s Seat. I always relish the opportunity to facilitate strategy or away days and designing these is a lot of fun, as well as challenging. Working with the team here combines my interest in coaching and educational technology, so it is one of my favourite engagements of the year already.
Thank you to Melissa Highton and her team for having me back again 🙂
The historic facade of St Leonard’s Hall
It was lucky indeed that many of my former colleagues from my ALT days found time for a coffee or even dinner, and it was fabulous to see my long-time co-blogger Martin Hawksey and Simon Horrocks complete with the rather famous Bailey (he is even cuter in “pawson”) in Edinburgh, as well as Joe Wilson, Sheila MacNeill and Lorna Campbell in Glasgow.
It’s invigorating and feels important to swap tales of what it’s like to work in education and technology in 2026, and have a chance to talk about all the things that Zoom meetings just don’t seem to be suited for.
My trip began with a long-overdue visit to my first mentor, Margaret Bennett, with whom I worked for many years when I first became a CEO. We met in a cafe in Sheffield, in exactly the same spot as we first met in 2012. Margaret has been an enormous inspiration to me throughout my career, and her incredible support for me as a leader has certainly had a lot to do with me stepping into coaching and mentoring EdTech leaders and leadership teams on a professional basis.
Ending January on a high inspired by such varied professional and social interaction has encouraged me to plan more such trips for the coming year, and reminded me powerfully just how much I sometimes miss the energy of in person interaction. More blogging to come on that topic in the coming months, I am sure.
I hope your January has had some bright spots, too.
Earlier this month the open knowledge community celebrated a big milestone as Wikipedia turned 25! I blogged about it on the Reclaim Blog, and had the pleasure of joining a lovely line up to celebrate:
Recording of Reclaim’s “Wikipedia @ 25 stream, with Autumm Caines, Lorna Campbell, Jim Groom and Taylor Jadin.
It was inspiring to have a conversation about open knowledge, particularly in an age of information abundance (read Dave Cormier’s book on that subject in case you haven’t yet!) . Incidentally, the book’s subtitle, “The Community is the Curriculum” would have made an excellent theme for the live stream, as we mainly talked about people and community.
Communities that support the creation, sharing and storing of open knowledge. Communities that add, edit, and provide governance for open knowledge (“Wikipedia contains over 65 million articles across over 300 languages”). Communities that are underrepresented, or don’t have a voice in open knowledge projects, and communities that build open knowledge creation on the kind of open source software and infrastructure that Reclaim has long championed.
We also shared our personal experiences of how we encountered Wikipedia and its sister projects in our own education, at work, for research, as parents and professionals. It was surprising to me, someone who has had little formal involvement with Wikipedia itself, how much each of is had to contribute, from using it day to day for looking things up, hobbies or research, to using it as a tool in the classroom, to teach digital skills and literacy or for institutional initiatives.
Our stories, our activities, form only a very small part of the overall engagement and use with this incredible platform: “Wikipedia is viewed more than 15 billion times every month.”.
These statistics shared by Wikipedia as part of the celebration are all incredible. The one that made me pause most however is this one: “Wikipedia is edited 342 times per minute.”.
That means that whilst I was writing this blog post, over 4,000 edits have been made. And whilst you have been reading this, hundreds more have been added. There’s another one. And another 10. And another 100.
Our conversation on the stream, and I hope you’ll watch the recording if you missed it live, was an opportunities to tell stories and share perspectives about our journeys from a world in which Wikipedia didn’t exist, to one in which we can’t really imagine life without it. It made me reflect on how it became what it is today: a project in which thousands of editors participate in every minute of the day, producing this source of open knowledge.
Happy Birthday, Wikipedia! Here’s to the next 25 years of human knowledge in the open!
I love writing these end of year posts and I have been doing it for quite a few years: 2024 focused on gratitude, 2023 on my (then new) business venture, 2022 I looked back at 10 milestones, 2021 – the year of the PUPPY – had a lot packed into it and 2020, well, you will remember your own 2020. I wrote two posts in December that year: 2020 #altc – the year forged in fire and 2020 – My year in blog posts, on radio and in drawings .
So what about this year?
I’ve used these close up photos of paintings I’ve been working on this year as a theme for my post, a triptych of a post if you like, to capture the three themes of my year: Joy. Creativity. Focus.
HorizonSeascapeBeach at sunset
Joy
When I think back to January 2025… I probably wouldn’t have guessed that joy would be one of the themes to come out of my review post at the end of a year filled with unhinged politics, unfettered use of AI and so much upheaval everywhere you look. And still, the joy is undeniable. I’ve done much this year that has been so rewarding, from regular beach trips and travel abroad to getting married again and spending time with family and friends. My year as a pen pal has been prolific and one of the greatest joys of the year was the house filled with postcards and letters from friends all across the world wishing us well on our wedding day.
I’ve accomplished a long-term goal to get back into running, and managed to complete several 10k races over the last 12 months. This in turn brought about a spontaneous decision to fulfil a big dream of mine next year: running the Vancouver Half Marathon. Come May 2026, my husband and I will both be standing on the starting line, hopefully with quite a few friends joining us, too. I’ve been meaning to return to Vancouver ever since my first visit in 2019, and I can’t wait to be in BC once again.
These moments of joy have been so precious, and I am grateful indeed for the friends, family and four-legged creatures that have shared those moments with me (even very early in the morning).
Creativity
As you have no doubt gathered already from my posts this year, I have been having an exceptionally creative year, from analogue adventures in painting, drawing, crafting, embroidery and model building to digital creation, writing, making and designing. I have flexed the skills I gained in art school, and put the DIY tools my dad gave me to good use. I also commandeered a second desk (my so called “weekend desk”) so that I (finally) have a space to be messy again, to leave things to be picked up and continued later. I can’t tell you how good it feels.
To give you a sense of what these projects have been, here is a summary of some of the things I have made this year: a book nook, a flower shop model, a garden shed model, hand embroidered Christmas stockings, acrylic paintings on canvas, watercolour drawings on paper, several dozen digital artworks, an illustrated digital story, started a new book (non-fiction), wrote several short stories, a year long (12 module) postcard based coaching subscription complete with custom made postcards that I sent all across the world, many talks, presentations, workshops, blog posts, podcasts, radio shows, playlists, a vinyl yoga practice, lots of new recipes and even more DIY in the form of newly painted rooms, garden furniture and… well, I think you get the idea.
Suffice to say that I have poured a lot of creative energy into the world, in an effort, to “let creativity eat the darkness“. I have done much to shape the world with my imagination and to populate my world with things that are made by me. Which is why the title of the post refers to the handmade year of 2025.
Focus
The year has been filled with joyful moments and with a lot of time devoted to creativity. It has also been a year of clear focus and much progress. Focus on my business and my professional practice. Now in its third year of being my full-time job, my business has evolved and become more robust and tangible.
Like everyone else I’ve found the uncertainty level in Higher Education and every other sector I work in rather dampening, making it harder to find work and putting everyone under pressure. That said, my efforts in developing my offering and my company of one have paid dividend and building in more focus and flexibility has proven very effective, too.
I’ve had many professional highlights this year, including an unexpected but most welcome award of Honorary Life Membership from ALT, a community which means so much to me. Being part of the ALT Wales Member Group and continuing my work as a Senior CMALT Assessor enables me to keep up with current practice in Learning Technology and Open Education, and connect with this wonderful network.
Also, I am excited to have become a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts this year (and can how add “FRSA” to my list of post-nominal letters on LinkedIn ;)). It’s such a rewarding and interesting community to be part of, and I am looking forward to getting stuck in as a mentor in the mentoring network and start to connect with more fellows in the new year both here in Cardiff and elsewhere. If you are also a member, look me up on the Circle platform 🙂 .
My work continues to be varied, which is a joy for someone like me with many interests and aptitudes. Teaching, training and coaching continues at the University of Oxford, and Sereniti as well as internal cohorts at organisations. Whilst I continue to do some executive coaching with individuals, the bulk of my work has been with leadership teams and groups.
Consultancy projects with Reclaim Hosting, especially the innovative Reclaim Open conference, have been an inspiring part of my year and I deeply appreciate working with such a wonderful team of people.
I’ve also continued work in the digital heritage sector, building on a number of projects I worked on in 2021-2023 as part of the Towards a National Collection and Digital Heritage initiatives. Digital heritage and digital humanities is becoming more of a focus for my consultancy work, and I am looking forward to working more in that space in 2026.
One of the things I reflected and focused on this year was how I work, not only what I do. The values that inform my work have shaped my practice, what I bid for, and what I strive for. So to close this post I wanted to share a the notes I scribbled below, which helped me articulate how I embody the values of my business and why.
Here’s to a more open and blended, ethical and meticulous 2026, continuing to give back in gratitude to the amazing communities I am part of.
