Maren Deepwell

Category: things I like

  • Updating my short bio… or ‘Hello, I’m a dog person’

    Updating my short bio… or ‘Hello, I’m a dog person’

    At the moment I am working on a new short bio to put on my social profiles. It’s not a task I relish because I do a lot of different things and work with a number of communities, so whatever I put will alienate some and attract others. It’s one thing I miss about being a CEO, as at least those three letters took up very little of the character count 😉 . Now that I am my own boss, I am not quite sure what to write. I also work increasingly with folk in digital and workplace wellbeing outside of academia, and to them the title ‘Dr’ is more likely to translate into the assumption that I am a GP or Psychotherapist… which sometimes leads to interesting conversations… .

    So I am trying to transform:

    I work with edu orgs + non profits as an independent consultant & coach. Author, speaker, podcast host, houseplant enthusiast, runner, dog person.

    into something a little more, well, something I like better.

    Which brings us to the final few words in the current bio, namely that I am a dog person. I don’t describe myself as a dog parent, but I certainly love the two canine companions that live with us, and I view them as very much part of the family.

    I mention being a dog person in my bio to share something real about myself, something that’s a big interest and part of my life. Having a dog was a childhood dream of mine and when I was little I begged and borrowed dogs from kind families on holiday, which I proudly walked around the camp sites.

    Now that my dream has become a reality, I am so glad to have the fun that dogs bring in my life. I love waking up in the morning and witness the bouncy morning joy that comes with two labradors who can’t wait to have breakfast, share morning tea and cuddles. Our dogs are definitely morning people.

    As a home and hybrid based professional, I also appreciate the extra motivation that dogs bring to my work/life balance. From getting in a couple of miles of walking each day to getting up from my desk regularly to check in with them, open the garden door and so on. Together we attend online conferences… meetings… and get through long, productive days at my desk.

    In that sense, mentioning being a dog person in my bio and posting the occasional pictures of them on my blog is a useful shorthand for folk who don’t know me and can provide an easy topic of conversation, too.

    So, where does that leave my bio? Here’s my current best draft:

    Meticulously informal coaching & courses for established and emerging leaders. Education and adjacent spaces, hybrid working, digital wellbeing, unconventional career paths. Author, podcast host, fan of writing letters, dog person.

    Subscribe to my free monthly newsletter!

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  • … we did it again.

    … we did it again.

    A few years ago the OERxDomains21 Conference, a conference of firsts in 2021, fired up the world of online conferencing against the dark backdrop of the pandemic. It was an amazing event, and, as I wrote at the time:

    …it’s been a career highlight for me, to lead my team on a rollercoaster ride which ended in an event we are all proud of. WE WILL DO IT AGAIN.

    I wrote that in April 2021 and as it turns out, WE DID IT AGAIN. This week in fact as another event, another conference of firsts, rocked the radio: DS106RadioSummerCamp.

    When I pitched the idea to Jim and the team at Reclaim, I tried to go all in:

    Imagine summer camp, on the radio, connecting with friends old and new as you tell stories around the campfire, reflecting on the year that’s been and learning a whole lot along the way. 

    At the time, I had no idea whether it would be possible for us to pull this off at all and indeed whether anyone would turn up in the middle of August for a week of radio on DS106Radio… and how we would somehow pull this all together into a coherent schedule for folk to follow.

    Making it open

    One of the things we all agreed one from the outset is that the event would be completely free and open to all, and that all the resources would similarly open and easy to access, download and share again. We get open and we do open, and to round it off you ALSO have broadcasts and documentation of how it works behind the scenes from how to create the podcast recordings to how to host your very own radio station. Reclaim rocks open!

    Making it more inclusive and accessible

    The other thing we wanted to make happen was to make the event more accessible. Radio has some limitations from the outset, and so we started to experiment with recordings and transcripts as a way to help folk access the event in different formats and across time zones. Thanks to a phenomenal response to our open call, we had a lot of speakers and guest DJs join us on air over the course of the week.

    Making it fun

    My favourite thing about the Summer Camp was that is was FUN. Having fun on the internet, with friends, it was amazing. The schedule looked incredible once it all came together… and the reality lived up to the hype. There were so many creative sessions making the most of the medium. Kudos to everyone who gave this a go! We salute you.

    Making it golden

    It’s no coincidence that both of these events were made possible with the incredible team at Reclaim. There is so much gold dust sprinkled around in this space where experimenting is the order of the day and curiosity is prized so highly! That’s what makes it possible to make events like this happen… and to give us the golden moments that we remember in years to come.

    We did it again.

  • Let’s Walk’n’Blog…

    Let’s Walk’n’Blog…

    Hi, welcome to this blog post which I am not typing but dictating.

    It is now mid-morning and I have plans to be getting on with before I have to be at my desk. So I wanted to try and write this blog post as I’m doing things… I’m making some coffee just now and I’ve just come back from walking the dogs. So it is a good time to blog but not a good time to sit at my desk. Hence the dictation.

    Recently I had a really interesting conversation with one of my coaching clients around the benefits of not always sitting down to reflect or to write, avoiding being faced with a blank piece of paper or a blinking cursor on an empty screen. Instead, we talked about ways to use technology like dictation software for example to try and give yourself some flexibility. Inspired by this conversation, I went back through a couple of blog posts I have written about how to reflect, and I came across one about using dictation for reflection. From there, it was a small jump to try and use it to write a blog post, too.

    Now, just as I was recording this, the doorbell rang, and it was a delivery. One of the joys of living and working in a community around many people who still work in an office, is that I get to be the local delivery depot for all deliveries in the neighbourhood. And it’s so practical to be able to just pause, walk to the door, deal with things and then being able to come back to this without having to run up and down, start typing again, start a new document and so on.

    Using voice recording also gives me a chance to write a different kind of blog post with a different kind of voice, one where I’m sipping coffee, thinking about things, having a bit more room to explore, which is lovely. Now, the joy of being able to record voice notes and turn them into blog posts is transcription software. Recently I’ve started to use a different software package, whisper transcription, which is easy to get and great, particularly when you’re a Mac user. And I’ve been using this for my podcasts, but also to make some of my audio resources more accessible. I’ve been finding it a real joy to be able to have a very easy and quick transcription that I get to keep rather than something that a platform that I use makes and then they keep it. It’s been fascinating to produce and then use transcripts of podcast episodes and interviews.

    The other thing I really like about using voice recording instead of typing on a keyboard is that I can take my blog activity on walks and get out more. At the moment for me it’s summer, although you wouldn’t know it by looking out of the window. It’s grey and dreary and it’s just about to start raining. But this morning, when I would normally spend time sitting at my desk, I really felt like going out with the dogs to have a nice walk to start the day.

    I’m going to spend plenty of time later sitting at my desk and staring at a screen. Being able to make a quick voice recording on my phone and then being able to have the transcription of that which I can turn into a blog post is a nice way of giving myself an opportunity to kind of reflect as I walk and talk. I felt inspired as I was walking and I often have my best thoughts in the morning. I had some ideas about the new course I’m working on, specifically the design of the course. And I thought, oh, I really need to write this down when I get back to my desk.This is a really good idea! I was thinking about the ] course design, which is a blended design in a number of different ways, it’s both online and a physical thing. It’s asynchronous and synchronous and so on. And as I was rehearsing in my mind what I was going to say to introduce the course in a short video, I thought, oh, great, I can just record myself now with my phone, make a quick voice memo and record the thoughts that are on my mind. I can note them down now. When I come home, I can just pop them into the transcription software and voila! I’ve got my notes from my inspired dog walk ready to go for when I want to sit down and get back to working on that video.

    For me, recording my ideas as I walk feels like a really lovely seasonal way to create more flexibility in my day, particularly as at the moment my meeting time is blissfully low. So now that I’ve got a bit of breathing room in the summer for the first time in many years, it’s just so joyful to be able to have 10 meetings a week rather than 80 meetings a week. And it’s also a relief not having to have every single meeting be a revenue generation must have rand instead have scope for exploratory conversations to see where things are going.

    So, yeah, I think his is probably all I want to cover in this post and I’m very curious to see how long this post turns out to be. Usually when I sit down to write a blog post, I know what I’m looking for in terms of length, and I very rarely write very long blog posts. Sometimes I get into the rhythm and I’ll write something longer, but most of my blog posts are fairly short. And so it’s interesting to see how that will differ in this format. I shall write a little post script to see how many words this blog post ended up being [this post is 996 words].

  • From Record Store to ReclaimPress.

    From Record Store to ReclaimPress.

    I feel very lucky to continue my work with the awesome team at Reclaim into summer, and this month I have bagged myself one of the best pieces of work going: a conversation with Bryan Mathers all about that unique vinyl aesthetic and the brand new venture that is ReclaimPress.

    Over the last 10-12 years I have had the privilege of collaborating on many projects with Bryan, and I deeply appreciate his listening skills, his creativity and his grit. He recently ran the London Marathon and showed once again that once you put your mind to something, a lot indeed can be achieved.

    Every one of our conversations helps me reflect and leaves me inspired. So, yes, when there’s an opportunity to talk about how Reclaim’s aesthetic has developed from the early days of record stores and vinyl covers to the newly minted ReclaimPress, I jumped at the chance.

    I’ve already blogged about it on the Reclaim Blog, but I didn’t want to miss the chance to also shout here about our upcoming Reclaim TV session:

    Join us on Friday, May 17th at 3pm GMT / 10am ET for a very special conversation, a peek behind the scenes of the creative process behind the stunning visuals… and a chance to join the beta programme for ReclaimPress, too. Watch the stream over at Reclaim TV, or catch the recording later on archive.reclaim.tv or our YouTube channel as we go from passion project to web empire… . See you there!

  • Analogue v digital. Non-fiction reading for April

    Analogue v digital. Non-fiction reading for April

    My favourite read for this month has to be The Revenge of Analogue by David Sax. Although this book was published nearly ten years ago, and some of the research it is based on would have been changed by the pandemic, I found it a really inspiring read. I love all things analogue from stationary and paper notebooks, to sending actual letters in the post and listening to vinyl records, and I have read a LOT of books about these (if you have never come across the fabulous Adventures in Stationary by James Ward, I thorough recommend it. There is a whole history of post-it notes and paperclips to be discovered!). What I found fascinating about The Revenge of the Analogue was the business perspective: examples of how industries were revived not for nostalgic reasons, but because of profit.

    Standing in line on Record Store Day, patiently waiting with hundreds of other enthusiasts, it made me so happy not to be the only woman who was waiting to buy a record. The independent record store industry here in Cardiff seems to be thriving, reaching new audiences beyond the stereotypical collectors. There were families, young adults and teenagers (at 7am!) and… plenty of women – all waiting to get their hands on the newest releases whilst sipping coffee in the early morning sunshine and watching the recycling being picked up by lorries from the nearby bars and restaurents. Quite a different story to a few years ago, when I was definitely part of a small minority of new enthusiasts. Yay for the popularity of analogue (even if it results in hipster style queuing at ungodly hours).

    On my radar for this month

    A brand new read arrived by post yesterday, thanks to a kind friend, who sent me Mary Oliver’s Devotions. I love a bit of poetry, and I am looking forward to exploring this volume. Reading the description, I was won over by the promise of ‘exuberant dog poems’.

    Non-fiction reading 2024

    Creativity and culture

    • Art Matters by Neil Gaiman and Chris Riddell
    • Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

    Hybrid working and leadership

    Coaching and reflective inquiry

    • The Big Book of Beautiful Questions by Warren Berger
    • Coach the Person not the Problem by Marcia Reynolds
  • All things open, all things fun!

    All things open, all things fun!

    This week is Open Education Week and I am super excited to join in the fun, celebrating all things open in education. If you want to catch me live, I am joining a whole host of special guests on air hosted by the one and only Alan Levine on Wednesday:

    P.S. It was a lot of fun to join Alan online, and here is a screenshot of a moment that made me smile: all of us talking about online, digital, AI and so forth, surrounded by books.

    Open practice is central to all the work I do and for the past ten years my interest in and commitment to open has only increased. So it’s been a special pleasure to take part in a series of conversations in the run up to this week:

    Building Community with guest Martin Hawksey!, Reclaim TV, 9th February 2024 was the first of these. I was lucky to join my Reclaim colleagues Amanda and Taylor and our special guest Martin Hawksey, who for me is both a friend and long-term collaborator. Community building is really at the heart of open practice for me, and we chatted about how to engage with people, how to reach new communities and networks, the impact of the pandemic and the changes in the social media landscape. Martin has more experience in this space than most, having built, curated and supported communities from the local to the global scale over the past fifteen years or more. There is little he isn’t expert in when it comes to making technology serve communities, and in this session he shares some of his reflections as well as tips 🙂

    Building on that conversation, Reclaim & OER #4Ever, with Meredith Huffman, Reclaim TV, 16 February 2024 took the community building one step further as we previewed a talk we are planning for OER24. The theme of the talk is putting community together with capabilities and CPD, sharing approaches for gaining skills and expertise in open educational technology. Plus, we share a lot of fun memories of what we got up to at open education conferences over the years.. (friendly warning: shoe tweets are mentioned in this episode). I love how Meredith explains how building on hosting and infrastructure the community piece can help empower staff to have a better relationship with tools and technology which benefits not only the institution, but students as well. I can’t wait for OER24!

    For me the conversation that brought all the elements together was Using Open Source tools as key infrastructure, with Anne-Marie Scott, Reclaim TV, 1 March 2024. This is the one where we talk big picture, global policy and institutional change. I love listening to Anne-Marie share her rich, reflective perspective and admire her ability to explain even the most complex dynamic in open source and open tech with such clarity, that you always leave inspired and empowered in equal measure.

    And to add another piece of blogging goodness, I have shared a bit more over on the Reclaim blog.

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    Image credit: CC-BY Bryan M Mathers