Maren Deepwell

Category: things I like

  • #femEdTech: my fourth year as a guest curator

    Hello!

    It’s my privilege to reflect on my fourth year of volunteering as a guest curator for 2 weeks for @FemEdTech.

    If you haven’t come across it before, I encourage you to:

    The last time I curated the account was just over a year ago, in February 2020. In this post, I wrote about my experience, and the humanity I found in our hashtag, our network. Things had changed enormously since May 2018 when I first volunteered, and also March 2019, my second time as a guest curator.

    Each year, I used my time as a guest curator to reflect on how much our community had developed and grown and it is no different this year – and yet everything is different.

    No time, no energy

    Having time and energy for projects such as this, however important, has been impossible for many since the global pandemic we are still facing began. So if you are one of us who has struggled to keep your head just above water, above a cloud of depression or if you are bone-tired from home-schooling, care or just breathing, then this is especially for you:

    We hear you, we see you and you are just as much part of our community when you can’t engage as when you can. You are welcome here no matter how.

    There is no need to apologise or explain or feel guilty. If you made it through the past 12 months then that’s enough and I salute you.

    Equality matters.

    In these times of crisis, what we care about is important and seeing how many people have taken action to address inequalities in their own context is truly heartening. From fighting digital poverty to championing open knowledge sharing through initiatives such as the Open COVID Pledge for Education, the work everyone has put into supporting each other has been amazing.

    As we prepare to celebrate International Women’s Day 2021, which is something that I care about, I have been reflecting on the theme for this year: choose to challenge (#ChooseToChallenge).

    A challenged world is an alert world. Individually, we’re all responsible for our own thoughts and actions – all day, every day.

    We can all choose to challenge and call out gender bias and inequality. We can all choose to seek out and celebrate women’s achievements. Collectively, we can all help create an inclusive world.

    From challenge comes change, so let’s all choose to challenge.

    https://www.internationalwomensday.com/theme

    There is a general call to action, to raise you hand, show your support and solidarity, and that is what for me curating the FemEdTech Twitter account is all about.

    Yes, full social, economic, and political equality for women, particularly in Learning Technology, is not the only challenge I want to work for, but it is one that I care about enough to make time and get active.

    So on this #IWD2021, if you can, join us on the #femEdTech hashtag and share what you #chooseToChallenge.

    P.S…. oh yes, and radio

    If you’d like to hear three women who have spent a year of lock down Sundays being silly and supporting each other via chat and tunes on the radio, then you are welcome indeed to join us on 7 March for an International Women’s Day Special radio show on DS106 radio.

  • Drawing 2020 – a bit of strategic ‘visual thinkery’

    Earlier this year, I blogged about that I feel I am starting a ‘new job’ as things have changed so much over the past year… so this week on Friday I am having a strategy away day, pandemic style.

    CEOs often get asked what success will look like in 3, 12 and 36 months. Asking yourself that question is a useful way to get your own thoughts in order and prioritising short, medium and long term goals.

    Often, the kind of success measures or KPIs you’d include range from internal to the organisation to external stakeholder groups, from local to national to international. That’s the kind of thing an Impact Report is made for and that is important – but not helpful for me just now.

    I am looking to re-imagine, to re-assess and to start from a blank page. Cue a bit of drawing and colouring…

    Putting pen (and brush) to paper

    I find it helpful to start with a blank page and the first thing I drew was a little flag, planted at the start of the year. It marks the launch of ALT’s (then) new strategy for 2020-25 (…best laid plans etc).

    From there, it was a story of firsts… the first pivot online… our first ever fully online OER conference… the first time that we ran an event with 1,000+ registered participants, and the first ever time that we had to fully refund hundreds of paying delegates AND the first time those participants donated nearly £10,000 to help cover the losses we were making.

    The first time that we drew up an emergency budget and plan just two months after setting the first ones… the first time we made an emergency strategy and held an emergency Board meeting.

    In June we held our first ever fully online AGM with in-house voting. And in July, ‘business as usual’ included open calls for volunteers, editors, committee members – all for activities which were changing continuously.

    Our first ever online Summer Summit took place in August, the first ever fully online awards short-listing process in September and the start of term saw us provide a second wave of support webinars, resources and care for an increasingly exhausted membership, preparing for an academic year that would be like… no one knew.

    In November we launched our first ever CMALT Accelerator workshops and in December the Winter Conference saw our first ever online Awards Ceremony and first ever Community Award to every Learning Technologist.

    By the end of the year, we had also published 49 new research papers, double the average number and the first time that we reached such a high number of publications.

    A year of firsts – pandemic style.

    Doing this drawing, sitting and thinking, letting my pen guide my thoughts, is incredibly helpful. It allows me to see beyond the KPIs and budget columns – and these don’t feel terribly meaningful anyway in a global pandemic context.

    What does feel meaningful to me is the picture I have in my head of the past year. A picture of an agile, learning organisation where everyone contributed to us achieving a lot of successful firsts.

    I also see thousands of professionals whom we have supported through the ups and downs of 2020… from sharing open resources and offering full scholarships to running support webinars and providing much needed CPD.

    I like the idea of last year being a year of firsts and as well as all the bad stuff, there are a lot of positives to take with us.

    The next blank piece of paper is going to be for 2021. A year of… ?

    What success for ALT looked like… in 2020

  • Goodbye, January – I’m heading downtown

    It’s finally January 31st – and I am still standing. Things continue to be bleak, and whilst I am lucky that COVID hasn’t killed me and neither has boredom… work continues to feel like it’s busier than ever!

    In cheering news

    So… it’s time to celebrate the positives of this month, starting with the best musical moment of the month:

    My colleague Debs singing ‘Downtown‘ by Petula Clark on Thursday night at a virtual karaoke leaving do was super life affirming and joyous! The tune has been in my head ever since and it was SO MUCH FUN! Thanks to Jim Groom’s inimitable hosting, this was one online staff celebration with heart!

    Jim’s work inspired another highlight of my month, sharing the opening of Reclaim Arcade on Twitter and beyond, lighting up social media in HUGE VHS TAPES and neon. I am so much looking forward to visiting the arcade in Fredericksburg, Virginia on day!

    Congratulations to Jim and the whole crew on a wonderful new venture 🙂

    Also… I have BLOGGED!

    Including this one, I have already written 9 (nine!) blog posts this year.

    I wrote some ‘getting back into work’ at the start of the month including this post on feeling like I have a whole new job.

    Also, some posts on virtual teams and leadership, a highlight of which has been this post Celebrating 3 years as a virtual team – an #altc perspective: a joint post by the whole ALT staff team written as we celebrate our three year anniversary as home-workers, running the leading professional body for Learning Technology as a virtual organisation and successfully charting a way through the ups and downs that the last three years have brought for us as a team.

    And also writing about OERxDomains and AmplifyFE.

    Small things have made a big difference this month:

    It snowed and that transformed the world around me…

  • #EdTech blogging ice breaker… or how to blog my way through a crisis

    I love blogging. Over the past few months I have been finding it hard to find the words. I don’t just want to blog for work, I also want to blog for fun. I want to allow myself to be curious… . I want to give myself permission to just think about things without my voice being dominated by news headlines, risk registers or fear.

    And that is when I came across this post: The Ed Tech Metaphor Generator and I had a play generating my own metaphor challenges in the search for blogging inspiration.

    This is the first topic contender:

    http://metaphor.edtechie.net/

    The next one I generated was: “What does gardening tell us about lecture capture?”, which got me thinking, and then I clicked the button again and…

    Use the development of New York graffiti styles as a metaphor for blogging

    …this heading was born. I am going with that one!

    First up, because it gives me an excuse to urge you to read The City We Became! If you aren’t familiar with the work of N.K. Jemisin then you should definitely have a look and immerse yourself in the worlds she has built in her books. I was a big fan of the THE BROKEN EARTH series and I am about to start reading the The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms series, but The City We Became was the first book I bought when the lockdown started and I couldn’t put it down even though it was far from cheering:

    Every great city has a soul. Some are as ancient as myths, and others are as new and destructive as children. New York City? She’s got six.

    But every city also has a dark side. A roiling, ancient evil stirs in the halls of power, threatening to destroy the city and her six newborn avatars unless they can come together and stop it once and for all.

    http://nkjemisin.com/

    But graffiti is all about the fabric of a city and this book certainly captures that. It’s also about the life of a city, its stories, and that way we loop back to blogging.

    I also came across this article recently: Graffiti Is Back in Virus-Worn New York which makes for an interesting read (and beautiful photos of new graffiti in New York which are definitely worth a look).

    From the South Bronx to East New York, a new generation of graffiti writers has emerged, many of whom have never hit a trainyard or the inside of a subway car. But like early taggers who grew up in a city beset by crime, grime and empty coffers, today’s generation is dealing with its own intense fears over the devastating effects of the coronavirus on communities and the economy.

    “Does art dictate the times or do the times dictate art?” said John Matos, 58, a graffiti writer known as Crash who started out in the 1970s. “Before now, the streets were sanitized, with pieces that were cool and nice, and done with permission. Now, we’re back to the roots.”

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/nyregion/graffiti-nyc.html

    A bit like the EdTech Emergency Radio which has been filling the airwaves #ds106radio as a response to dealing with fear and isolation, emergency blog posts fill social media with helpful tips, practical advice and accounts of what happens when you face such odds as everyone is this year.

    Yet beyond that there is more coming out of the posts, sometimes anger, sometimes hope. A reflection of our times.

    Maybe the circumstances which enable a new generation of graffiti writers to find their voice on the streets of New York will also give space to a new generation of blog posts and conversations. I for one am grateful to have found a pocket of time and inspiration to ponder something different for a while. Thank you, EdTech Metaphor maker 🙂

    Next time… “Use quantum physics as a metaphor for blogging.”

  • Hope on the airwaves: #DS106Radio Sunday Special

    Live on Air

    It’s a few weeks into lock down and the last couple of Sundays, Anne-Marie, Tannis and I have been getting together on the airwaves, playing tunes and sharing stories on DS106Radio. Many of us are tuning into the live stream in recent weeks:

    Our first live broadcast, on Sunday 29th March, was an improvised conversation and playlist, organised very much by Anne-Marie, who figured out the technical set up required to mesh Skype call and internet radio first. The second one, the following week, on Sunday, 5th April, had a bit more a theme, but still ended up being very much just a conversation. Talking with each other and sharing our voices with our audience feels more important than ever in these times of isolation.

    Anne-Marie is recording and hosting recordings on her blog:
    Our second #ds106radio show. We did it again!
    We were picking from our Scottish Surprises Spotify playlist.

    I have bee really enjoying playing tunes and sharing memories as well as checking in with two friends who live far away, on a different continent, connecting across time zones.

    I have also been drawing… making virtual stickers:

    Like many others, I have been enjoying tuning in to the online radio ’emergency broadcast’ listening to familiar voices and some that are quickly becoming familiar, sharing stories of coping under lock down, facing uncertainty, sharing loneliness and lack of freedoms.

    I love the broadcasts, partly because they remind me every day that there is nothing ‘business as usual’ about this time. That it’s completely OK not to function or cope or be able to even get up in the morning.

    The radio also reminds me of how resilient human beings are. It gives me a sense of how hard everyone is working, fighting, trying. There’s hope on the airwaves.

    To all of you who are sharing songs and stories, thank you. I am out there, listening.

    To all fellow listeners, I am sending a hug. A really good one.

    See you on Sunday #DS106Radio.

    Image
    Us three at ETUG, Kamloops, June 2019 with Clint in the background.

  • Blogging along #FemEdTechQuilt

    I am working on ideas in order to make, and that’s the key word here, a contribution (7 x 7 inches) to The Femedtech Quilt of Care and Justice in Open Education. Read all about what this is and more here. Read it, share it, get involved. This is important.

    I have never made anything for a quilt. I can hardly sew a button back on so that it stays on. I tried to learn how to knit, but although the women in my family are super craft capable as a whole, I am NOT. So despite my keen interest in the project and the warm invitation, support and encouragement I have had along the way (THANK YOU to you, you know who you are) I am feeling thoroughly intimidated.

    I have made and shared some drawings of early ideas:

    And now I am thinking about how I can actually make something. Something that would capture how much I care about the cause that this project is all about.

    Quilts are very special. I don’t know much about the history, but I am lucky enough to own some. And they are very precious to me. They make my daily life a warmer, safer, more caring place. And that I value very much. For naps, for early mornings, for sleeping in winter, for bad days, for dark days. The quilts I own have been in my family for nearly forty years and recently one of them had to have emergency repairs. I brought it to my mother and hoped that she could help. It was late autumn and felt reminiscent of taking teddy bears that had lost eyes or ears or even a leg to be cared for and put back together… only to magically reappear under the Christmas tree – whole again. It always disturbed me that in Star Trek even Captain Picard never had a proper duvet or quilt for sleeping under. Only strangely metallic fabric blankets that seemed at least to me never really comforting. A proper quilt is a source of great strength and comfort and not something I’d like to be without in the future.

    And a future without care would be very bleak indeed, and not just in Open Education.

    I can’t wait to see this quilt come into being come April. And carry all of our hopes for change and resistance with it from OER20. I am deeply grateful to all those who make it happen and most of all thanks to Frances Bell.