You may have noticed that volunteer curation of @FemEdTech has been suspended. We are getting ready to restart (just have a bit of collaborative work to do). Once curators have worked on the new process and support for new curators, the doors will be open again. Watch this space
— FemEdTech – shared account for FemEdTech network (@femedtech) February 28, 2021
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:
visit the FemEdTech Open Space to find our about current projects and what’s happened in recent years.
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.
Last month, we, that is my whole team, blogged about celebrating three years as a virtual team! It was really, really enjoyable and rewarding for me as CEO to read the words and hear the voices of all of my colleagues. I am so grateful that some took the plunge to blog for the first time and others made time to contribute in the face of a big workload. It was a big deal for us as a team to mark the start of year four as a virtual team – a digitally and geographically distributed organisation. Where many other teams started in 2020, we were a few years ago – intentionally and with both strategy and time on our side.
That said, like every other small, agile team, we have been having to reinvent what we do, how we do it and, importantly, how we support each other in these challenging times of crisis and heartbreak.
You can find out more about how we are weathering the crisis and revisit all of our virtual teams posts here.
February 2021
This month, the focus is on achieving the right life work balance at a time of change – not ‘just’ with established colleagues within the organisation, but also with new teams and on new tasks.
I have had a lot of opportunities to explore this in recent weeks, as part of a new collaboration with the team at Reclaim Hosting, to organise the forthcoming OERxDomains conference (exciting!), as part of an external quality review panel for a university and through activities organised by a professional body for UK Association executives.
Collaboration with new folks is always inspiring, and also brings with it getting to know someone else’s working rhythm and practices. For example, when working across different time zones, it’s hard to avoid scheduling work outside of everyone’s normal working hours. I don’t normally work, at least visibly, outside my normal working hours, unless it’s for something like delivering a conference.
Many people rate CEOs who work all hours and show ‘commitment’ by working at weekends and through holidays, but I am not one of them. This post ‘Working on weekends‘ exemplifies some of what’s at stake, particularly when you are a manager or in a leadership role, really well.
“… there’s often a cultural belief that if you’re not burning the candle at both ends – if you’re not pulling 18 hour days and working on the weekends – you’re not trying hard enough. … Most knowledge workers can muster up to 4 to 6 hours of really productive work a day. After that, you get into make-work; the going through the motions, non-reflective phoning-it-in work that isn’t going to rock anybody’s world. Likewise, constant interruptions, eg on Slack, through random calls, or half hour meetings sprinkled throughout the day, interrupt flow state and dramatically drop productivity and well-being.”
https://werd.io/2021/working-on-the-weekends
Alongside the blog post, I came across this tweet:
I took real inspiration from Ben and the next day we implemented these new signatures across our team. Internally, the feedback was really positive as many of our staff have different working patterns including caring for family, home-schooling and so forth. Externally also, I received some spontaneous positive feedback from contacts I wrote to.
As a CEO, it’s part of my responsibility to model the kind of behaviours Ben blogged about and make that part of our culture as a virtual team: respecting different working patterns, not to work all hours, but only productive hours – particularly in these times of pandemic.
From Ben’s post, I moved to reading Mary’s post on life work balance (my coach recently mentioned how she puts ‘life’ ahead of the word work in this term – life comes BEFORE work)
Mary is an excellent writer and thinker and her post really struck a chord with me:
“…What isn’t such a good thing though, is not being able to turn off that running strategy session in my mind. It also runs when I’m reading in bed before going to sleep, when I’m meditating and when I’m playing video games with my teen. … I have become compassionately ruthless with myself when I have intentionally created a space for something like reading or meditation and my thoughts start running away. I don’t get mad at myself (this is also something I’ve had to learn how to do). I calmly guide myself back to the activity and resume focus. Sometimes I do that over and over and over.”
I found a lot of support in having a good therapist for much of 2019/20 and what Mary reflects on, the techniques used such as meditation, resonates with my own experience. You don’t have to suffer from Anxiety with a capital ‘A’ for these kinds of patterns of behaviour to become an issue – and lack of the right life-work balance really contributed to poor mental wellbeing in my case.
I am fortunate that I had the support to change things and it’s been a lot of hard work that continues each and every day, particularly during these times when there is always something urgent that demands my work attention or my personal attention. Care is work.
Which led me to this episode of the InVinoFab Book Club, which was all about burnout – a condition that we are reading more and more about at the moment. ‘Pandemic burnout’ rears its ugly head all too often and working in Learning Technology over the past year has rarely felt like anything other than fighting burnout.
But sometimes small practical steps have the most powerful impact, such as changing your email signature to send a clear signal that you DON’T expect anyone to respond to you immediately or outside their normal working hours.
Or finishing work on time or even early.
For me, there is a soon to be adopted puppy about to cause some (welcome) chaos in my working life as a CEO. No power cable will be safe… 😉
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… ?
Next Friday, I am having a Strategy Away Day – pandemic style. In past years, when I need time to really focus on strategy, I was often able to take an afternoon or a whole day and spend it with some members of my Board, colleagues or external contacts, having conversations over coffee or whilst walking in a park.
My first mentor Margaret and I often spent hours walking through whichever city we met in, plotting and planning the future – and I came away having mapped out my plans and ideas for the year ahead.
Ideas like closing our office and moving online first came up during one such conversation many years ago… and how we are into our fourth year as a virtual team with no looking back.
But in these strange times… and confined to my home and immediate surrounds, how can I have an away day? Well.. here is what I am thinking:
Things are very hectic just now, but as a CEO, there is nothing more urgent or important on my priority list than to have a clear vision, a strong focus of what’s ahead. So I have clearer the day in my diary.
That in itself feels like a win, as I haven’t had much time like this over the past year.
On the day, I have a session with a wonderful coach I sometimes see, who works for a small, independent HR provider, based in Sheffield. Working with agencies that serve solely small charities like ours really helps find support that is both excellent value for money and affordable (even in cash strapped times) .
Weather permitting, we will be speaking on the phone whilst going for a walk in our respective local areas and step outside of the usual desk/home office environment.
If it’s raining, I might decamp to the garage or at least the living room, to make sure I have a change of scene.
Catering is another factor I am planning ahead for: my weekly online shop is going to contain some unusual items as I return to buying provisions I would have had whilst travelling, including maybe a smoothie or a pre-packed coffee. Every little thing I can do to create some headspace is going to contribute to the success of my day.
I am also planning to work on a pitch, mostly to myself, but also to focus my thinking ahead of a day’s meeting with the Board the week after. I’d like to look back at some of the plans I made previously, and how they have changed.
I recently attended a monthly meeting of UK Association CEOs discussing ‘what will success look like in 2021’ and this gave me inspiration to try and ask myself that question in a new way.
In 2015, I wrote about about how I had hopes for ALT to reach 1,500 Members… now we have 3,500. Things have changed and there is so much scope for the work that we do to grow.
One of my strategies for getting through lockdown/pandemic burnout is to have a lot of green in my workspace. I can see at least six plants from where I sit each day.
Some of them are good at cleaning the air, some grow in intricate pattern and some grow in interesting shapes. Having discovered that I love succulents, I went about finding a local supplier and thanks to the wonderful Blasus Succulent Emporium, which is situated in a small independent shop collective here in Cardiff, I am now fully stocked 🙂
(Blasus is the Welsh word for something scrumptious, delicious or… succulent)
Crassula Estagnol
I know very little about plants and have killed many in my time, so in order to succeed with my new office buddies, I looked up specific care instructions and I try my best to follow them.
Cheeseplant
As a result, things are flourishing! That said, not every plant is doing so great, regardless of how carefully I try to look after them. Some are in shock due to the change in environment from a cool shipping container with freezing temperatures outside whilst others are struggling to find the right spot which has the appropriate amount of light, shade, warmth and cool.
What looks like dying chives is actually a rather special Albuca Spiralis, a plant that is meant to grow in spirals… it’s now in it’s fourth spot to try and find a sunny enough home in these dark days.
Similarly, my first and most stripy plant companion is struggling to grow happily. She is doing better now, in a bigger pot, but still not altogether in a happy place.
Transitions are tough. When things change, we react in different ways and the start of this year has brought with it a fair share of transitions and uncertainty. Unlike my office plants, the elements of my working life don’t come with such clear care instructions or indeed any labels that tell me what conditions they would flourish in. It’s a mixture of experience, trial and error… and hoping for the best.
Like with caring for plants, care and patience is much needed, and in these bleak times it can be hard to remember that. Somehow caring for the plants in my work space reminds me of that and I find new joy and inspiration in their efforts to grow – which translates into my working life.
In a meeting with other UK-based CEOs this week, someone said that there is just such uncertainty, that it makes no sense to base decisions about the future on our experiences of the past 10 months. We all agreed that the uncertainty was extremely tiring and that not knowing in itself was the worst aspect of being a leader in these uncertain times… cue pandemic burnout (which, to me at least, feels like a relatively fortunate type of burnout to suffer from in comparison with what others have to suffer). Yet, in my context, it still presents real and difficult challenges. Challenges that my green office buddies help me overcome.
Tomorrow is Friday, and it’s become a routine for me to start each Friday by looking after all the plants. I go round with an old deep plate and start a watering routine, giving everyone a drink. Sometimes one gets a new, bigger, pot. Some weeks there are dead leaves to remove or feed is needed.
Care. Time. Patience. Consistency. And with time, most will flourish. Definitely not a new insight, but it feels worthwhile to remind myself when sitting in the nth meeting of the day, answering endless emails and trying to balance all the different demands that leading an organisation through these times places upon me. Having plants for company somehow makes it all better, a little easier, a bit more… fun 🙂
Three years ago this week, we closed the door on our last physical office space and moved to becoming a distributed team. Since then, we have chronicled the journey we have been on as an organisation and as a staff team in regular blogposts, podcasts and conference papers, starting with this post from February 2018. A year on, in January 2019, I reflected on how the move changed things in this blog post and we also recorded a podcast. Last year, we wrote about how things were developing and we continue to collate resources that chart our journey as a virtual team.
This January, 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.
Over the past year, many other organisations and teams have had to rapidly adopt a way of working, that our organisation chose for strategic reasons and made a transition which we had time to prepare for. Trustees of ALT took the decision to move ALT’s operations away from a long-standing hosting agreement with a university to a more independent model, to ensure that ALT’s strategic aims and values are underpinned by an effective, agile base of operations providing more direct support for Members across the UK.
As we now know, this decision turned out to be a good one, both for ALT’s continued growth and success and also our ability to weather the global crisis we are currently facing. We have been walking the walk of using technology effectively for learning, management and governance day in day out.
Jane Frankel, who manages ALT’s charity finances, is one of our longest serving members of staff and a colleague who made the transition from physical office to virtual team with us.
Reflecting on how things have changed over the past three years, what’s been your experience of transitioning to being a full-time home-worker in the ALT staff team?
“Having been self-employed for many years and frequently worked from home, the transition to home working wasn’t difficult. My commute was certainly shorter! However, transferring several years of documents to electronic format and adapting to a home based team with less frequent face to face time was challenging. I miss my colleagues! Although we do meet online and communicate constantly, it’s still hard to get used to not having a face to speak with in person. Getting used to managing family and being home for kids when they’re back from school is definitely a plus. ALT has also made a point of ensuring everyone has flexibility in their work schedules to take time for themselves, which is extremely valuable.”
ALT became an independent employer at the same time as transitioning to working from home, and our Events Manager, Emma-Jane Brazier, joined our team on the first Monday as a virtual team, on 5 February 2018. Since then, we have been fortunate to have Emma-Jane’s expertise for two periods of maternity leave that Jane Southgate has been on, and Emma-Jane has thus been through two rounds of a fully virtual recruitment and onboarding process.
Emma-Jane, what’s your experience of working with ALT as part of a virtual team?
“I had never worked virtually before. Coming from a teaching background (prior to Covid) I was very much used to dealing with 100s if not 1000s of people a day. I thought it would be lonely but actually at times I could do with some more alone time! ALT has fostered a close knit, highly communicative and effective team. We talk with each other throughout the day, have regular catch ups and work collaboratively ALL the time. I really enjoy this and cherish it as I know from speaking with friends who have recently had to pivot to online working that this working environment is not always present. Having the physical team meeting days and events (in normal times) brings welcome opportunities to catch up with people and I hope for the team that they are able to return as soon as is safe.”
Before ALT made the transition to working from home for everyone, several members of staff were already home-based, enabling us as a team to work more closely with Members across the UK. Martin Hawksey, who served as ALT’s Chief Innovation, Community and Technology Officer until recently, was based in Scotland in the years leading up to the organisation closing its office in 2018.
Thinking back to a time when some of us were working from home full-time and some of the team were office-based, what has our move to being a fully virtual team brought with it for you, Martin, and what would you say are the upsides of everyone working as a distributed team for a small, agile charity like ALT?
“For organisations one of the big advantages is there is greater parity for staff. Before ALT became an entirely distributed team we were using a hybrid of office and home based staff, which meant that communications between the team were different depending on where you were based sometimes requiring additional measures to ensure the exchange of information and awareness of what was going on. With a fully distributed team effort is still required for formal and informal interactions, but everyone is in the same boat. Another big advantage for distributed organisations is when recruiting staff you are less restricted by geography allowing you to access a bigger pool of talent.”
In 2019, which now seems like a long time ago, our team found its virtual stride having successfully delivered two years of ALT’s full portfolio of activities, from large, international conferences and our peer-review journal to membership services across the UK.
We capitalised on the advantages of working as a distributed team and found solutions to the problems we encountered. Importantly, we didn’t completely stop meeting in person, retaining a blended approach that included team days for which we met in person (the team portrait from our 2019 team day in Birmingham gives you an idea of the ways in which we used to work together).
Being a virtual team, changed our organisation for the better and we reflected on this here.
We were lucky to recruit two new members to our team in 2019, with Fiona Jones joining us in June, followed in September by Debbie Baff.
Fiona leads on administration across all of ALT’s activities and is the person Members have most day to day contact with on the phone, via email and on social media. Fiona joined our team having had previous experience of working from home and a background in educational technology.
Fiona, why did you choose to work from home and what is your experience of being part of the ALT staff team?
“Having previously had experience of working at home before I joined ALT, I was very familiar with the concept, and really enjoy the flexibility that homeworking brings. Having extra time in the mornings and evenings with no commute is so beneficial, especially in these winter months when you can get out for an early walk in the sunshine. I also love being able to wear slippers for the whole working day! Creating your own comfortable environment is a huge factor for working efficiently.
When I joined ALT in 2019, it was so refreshing to join an organisation that does working from home so well. I love being part of the ALT Team, and we all do our best to try and provide alternative virtual versions of what we each miss from an office environment. I love being able to still celebrate colleagues’ birthdays and important events virtually, even though we are spread over hundreds of miles. Day to day, it’s also always nice to know that someone is always on the end of a chat message to help with a query, or to jump onto a video call with a cup of tea!”
As more and more of ALT’s Members have had to adapt to working from home since March 2020, often alongside home-schooling as well, we have been providing regular support in the form of webinars, drop in sessions and resources. Our Membership and Professional Development Manager, Debbie Baff, has been the member of staff who has led and supported many of these sessions, experiencing what ALT’s Members are contending with at work and at home.
Debbie, you started working with ALT and from home only months before the pandemic. Since your first day on the job at ALT’s Annual Conference 2019 in Edinburgh, how have things changed for you and how is working from home as part of our team for you?
“My first day on the job at ALT was spent at the annual conference up in Edinburgh, little did we know then that it would be our last face to face event for quite some time. That seems such a long time ago now. For me, I have to admit coming to work for ALT has been life changing. In my last job I had a 3 hour round trip commute down the M4 to work and back. That was so very tiring and quite frankly a real pain and let’s not go there about not being able to park when you eventually get there ! Being able to avoid all of that commuting hassle is just so much more productive and makes much more sense to me. Although I have had other experiences over the years of working from home before, it was a whole new experience of working for an organisation where everyone works from home. I remember wondering how that would work in practice before I started. I didn’t need to worry mind you as I think ALT has really got it right in terms of recreating a sense of belonging and fostering online social presence within the team. We are constantly in touch with each other either through messaging apps, email or video calls, we have regular meetups and as we are such a small team we are actually very well connected. These things don’t happen by magic though and have been very carefully thought out and planned for, in my experience you have to be a lot more deliberate in your communications when working at a distance to avoid misunderstandings and ALT works very hard at this.
Working from home during the pandemic has meant another level of readjustment though. I went from being at home all by myself with just the dog and two fluffy cats for company to a house full overnight. My husband was on furlough for a while which meant he was at home, and I have two teenagers so I have the whole homeschooling thing going on. Competing for wifi and bandwidth has become a daily occurrence, as has having to make lunch for other people during my lunch break rather than just grabbing what I want ! (Sadly I was hoping that having other people at home might have meant that I had a surprise cup of tea brought to my home office occasionally but I am however still waiting for that ! HINT HINT teenagers”
As the chief executive, my working practice has changed much since starting to work from home. I am deeply grateful that ALT’s Board of Trustees had the vision and foresight to steer the Association in this direction. I am very proud of the impact we have had over the past few years since the transition.
That said, it’s taken me a while to adapt to leading a team and an organisation from home and I continue to discover new ways of working, of finding balance between the demands of a very busy diary and needing space to think about the bigger, strategic picture. I now know more about the pets, kids and plants of my co-workers, Board members and colleagues across the world, and that has made my job more enjoyable and interesting.
As we, as a team, look ahead to what 2021 may bring and as we enter a more experienced and mature phase as a virtual team, we want to share some of the worst bits and some of the highlights that three years of working as a distributed team have held for us.
We invite you to reflect with us, share your own and hope that you will find something useful and inspiring in our continued journey as a virtual team.
The worst bits… there have to be some
The most difficult part of working from home for me, is having to provide virtual support in a crisis. When someone is having a really bad day or something unexpected happens, there’s only so much I can do via phone and video calls.
I end up doing more than my usual share of domestic chores as a home-worker.
I miss hugging colleagues when they need one!
Being not as active. Little walks to a bus stop, or tram, walking around an office all add up during a week so you have to make sure you don’t stay sedentary (to keep off the lbs! Must say I’m no expert at this)
Funnily enough one of the things I do miss from my looooong drive on the M4 every day is that decompression time and being able to listen to podcasts guilt free. For some reason I am also really bad about forcing myself to get outside and go for a walk, something I know is really important to do and something I am working on. I also miss being in an office when the banter is going on – I do love a good giggle. Although we do still have our fair share of funny memes across the ether which does help. Also in terms of the impact of the pandemic obviously there are the issues that has brought too although I have been lucky enough to be able to make some small changes to my working hours which means I can start earlier and finish earlier and that has definitely made a difference in terms of the bandwidth issue and also for a bit of headspace before the home schooling starts.
And the highlights… of which we have many!
I really don’t miss my 1+ hour long commute and I love the time I have regained for things other than sitting on delayed trains.
When I have caring responsibilities for my eldery parents, these are easier to fit into my working day from home than they were in an office.
No commute!! This is a big one as I didn’t realise how tiring it was. It also meant I could get rid of my car which is better for the environment. Also I think being able to work from home allows you to keep on top of household chores. E.g during my lunch I can quickly put a load of washing on or wash the breakfast dishes
The best bits, well that is a hard question, there are actually so many great things about working from home. It has definitely given me some life balance back and I love how it takes me 30 seconds to get to work in the mornings. I am really lucky in that I have a dedicated home office and don’t have to clear everything off the kitchen table at the end of the day. That would make things so much harder to manage. I love our little team, everyone is very thoughtful and so kind and even though we are based all around the UK somehow that distance really doesn’t seem to matter.
Written by Maren Deepwell with contributions from Emma-Jane Brazier, Debbie Baff, Jane Frankel, Fiona Jones and Martin Hawksey.
This post has been re-posted from the ALT website.
