Maren Deepwell

Tag: #altc

  • 2019 – the year on my ‘I love me’ wall

    Now, an ‘I love me’ wall is something Jim Groom introduced me to, ‘basically a space dedicated to all the stuff you’ve done..’. And I’ve come to embrace that concept wholeheartedly in my work space at home. Home working has never looked so stimulating and that’s a major plus on days when the heating is broken, the cat has been sick on the carpet and the doorbell rings with yet another delivery for next door. 

    In that spirit, this is the ‘I love me wall’ of the past year, celebrating the stuff I’ve done, been part of, am proud of and am inspired by… 

    Photo by Sandra Huskinson (@FieryRed1)

    One of the absolute highlights of my year was giving a keynote at the Social Media for Learning in Higher Education Conference in January, which led to conversations and collaborations that last for the whole year including this excellent webinar Academic online identity and social media .

    I really enjoyed working on this ‘keynote in three hashtags’… it was a great way to start the year, thinking about  how social media often comes with a general sense of the superficial, showing just the best side of myself, trying not to avoid being vulnerable for social media can be a toxic space for many, particularly for women, for people of colour, for anyone whom the trolls choose to single out. The talk focuses on three questions:

    • How is social media changing professional practice?
    • How does social media support openness in education?
    • Social media for social good?

    You can access the slide deck at https://go.alt.ac.uk/SocMedHE18Keynote or read the summary post here.

    A completely different kind of conversation started a month later, when I took part in a panel discussion at the Royal Society in London on Human Transformation Remembering and Learning alongside Diana Laurillard and Diana made a point that really resonated with me: Diana reminded us of the enormous scale of the demand for education (at all levels) worldwide. Diana reflected on how many hundreds of thousands of teachers will be needed to provide education and training as more and more learners in the global South in particular gain access to education and come online. 

    Keynoting at the RIDE Conference. Image: Sarah Sherman

    One of my favourite talks of this year was at the at the 13th Research and Innovation in Distance Education, and eLearning (RIDE) annual conference which took place on 14 March 2019 in London. This year’s conference focused on the themes ‘Professional development and student experience’ and my talk examined these as challenges for digital education.

    It was the interplay between learning and technology, how they effect each other to change our understanding and our practice, that is of particular interest. One of the areas of high priority I discussed is measuring learning, an interest in assessment and in a wide range of methods to quantify, track and chart all aspects of the learner experience. There is always a promise that with enough data and dashboards we can gain insights, leverage the power of learning analytics to understand more about how what we do impacts on progress, skills development and learning outcomes. It is up to us to develop our own capabilities in order to be able to understand fully how the more complex systems we use work, what determines when a ‘red flag’ goes up and how we should interpret and act on the information we gain in this manner. One of the last points I mad in this part of the talk picks up on a section of the 2018 Horizon Report, which describes rethinking the role of educators not as a solvable or even a difficult challenge, but a wicked one, as ‘complex to define, much less address’. This is why I think the work that my organisation does is so important, charting the changing role of professionals across sectors. This particular was a really valuable opportunity for me to explore this further with experts in distance education.

    You can access the full slide deck at https://go.alt.ac.uk/2EUioER or read the summary post.

    April had many highlights and a particularly special moment for me was to be joining #PressEdConf19 for a session that explored a conversational post format can be used to support reflective practice (read more here). The idea for the session came from an ongoing blog project in which Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey) and I write a monthly series of blog posts to openly share our approach to leadership. You can catch up on earlier posts and podcasts on this blog.

    It was a great experience to present at a Twitter only conference. I took part in quite a few virtual conferences this year, as a speaker and a participant and it is extremely useful to have those experiencing when you are have a role in organising events yourself.

    Later in the year we revisited the topic of conversational blogging in an unconference session at OEB Global. You can access the full slide deck here: https://go.alt.ac.uk/tts242 . 

    Gearing up for a @VConnecting session at #ccsummit with @MarenDeepwell & @dbeloved #CEOshoes #shoetweet (Photo by Christian Friedrich)

    May brought both online and in person interaction with the Creative Commons community as I was able to attend the CC Global Summit for the first time and it was a fantastic experience. I have long been involved in the Creative Commons community and various activities but this was my first visit to the event which is at the heart of it all and I was met with real warmth and welcoming acceptance. The creative and joyful atmosphere of the conference, from the handmade designs on the badges to the samba music playing throughout the museum conference venue conveyed a sense of celebration and joy at this meeting of so many in the Commons but also motivated to pull up your sleeves, get stuck in and do plenty of work (and there was A LOT to be done). Here I wrote about my experience in 10 tweets.

    Photo: Clint Lalonde

    In June I had the pleasure of participating in the ETUG conference in Kamloops, Canada. It was a real privilege for me to be there, to have been invited to contribute a keynote ‘You are more than a data point. Weaving a tapestry of hope and humanity’ to ETUG’s 25th Anniversary Conference, and also to have the honour of taking part in National Indigenous Peoples Day. I learnt a lot from my time in Kamloops and I wrote a couple of posts reflecting on the experience and the keynote I contributed:

    “I felt very much at home at the ETUG conference because just like the ALT community it is all about collaboration, reflection and sharing of best practice. After 25 years of working together (celebrated with a great donut birthday cake) this community has come to hold dear very much the same values as I do, recognising the power of sharing practice and research and working together to make change happen for students and staff alike.

    And you could tell that this event was very much organised with heart. Little touches everywhere made participants and speakers feel welcome from the start and created a space in which the moving narrative from Elder Mike on National Indigenous Peoples Day found an equally receptive audience as the newest members of the community sharing research findings or #femedtech conversations about equality and women in #edtech.”

    This talk was one of the most satisfying pieces of work I did this year and it brought together some different elements of my thinking that I subsequently published as a rewritten article in Educause Review.

    #altc staff team portrait

    As you may know, we are a virtual team and everyone works from home (even during a heatwave). This way, we can better work with Members throughout the UK. Being a virtual team has many upsides but one downside is that I don’t get to see my colleagues very often. When we do get together, as we did in July, we sometimes create a team portrait (alternatives to photos as we are mostly a bit camera shy) and this is one of my all time favourites. I enjoy planning our team days and I put a lot of effort into the preparations, just like I would for an event. Writing about the Annual Conference Martin Weller called our approach ‘meticulously informal’ and that captures not just the way we run events but also the way we work together precisely. 

    In early August, when the weather was hot and most people were on their summer holiday, I went to our monthly online Members  Assembly meeting. Most of these meetings are virtual and the reason why I took a screenshot was that I found it so inspiring that despite the heat, holidays and probably a heavy workload, the room was full of volunteers, engaging, taking action. That’s the secret sauce of building sustainable communities of practice: share power, have a purpose, provide consistent, robust structures and put the time in. Even in August, during a heatwave. 

    Picture by Chris Bull for Association for Learning Technology on Flickr

    This community portrait taken at the ALT Annual Conference is the first of it’s kind for us. The moment of that photo means a lot to me. It captures a few hundred participants. I keep it on my desktop to remind me each day that we serve ten times as many Members. It helps illustrate the scale of the core community I represent, it makes something that is largely a virtual network more tangible. Over the past ten years I have probably met more than half of our Members in person or connected with them directly online. Each voice matters. My job is to listen and to make them heard. 

    This is a photo I took of the Extinction Rebellion Protest in Westminster on a day I had a meeting with senior Edtech policy officials. We sat inside the building discussing essentially how to make change happen whilst outside, on improvised barricades, thousands were singing songs of fear and hope. 

    From left to right: Christian Friedrich, Maren Deepwell, Lorna Campbell, Laura Czerniewicz, Martin Hawksey, Christina Rupprecht (at the cat wall, Wikimedia Deutschland offices), Source: Tweet

    Working in partnership with Wikimedia Germany I was involved in organising an event in late November, an evening of discussion and debate on education, open participation and democracy and critical reflections. It was a very special collaboration and part of our work for the OER20 coming up in April next year.

    There is one more big item to add to the ‘wall’ for this year, and that’s ALT’s Impact Report 2017-20 which was published yesterday. Because, of course, the whole ‘wall’ is green… the tapestry through which bright threads of my year are woven spells #altc.

    It is a huge privilege to be a CEO and it most definitely is hard work as well. Being in a leadership position brings into focus all elements of who I am and that is reflected in the way I think and work. Borrowing from my ETUG talk to close my reflections on 2019:

    …”That brings us back to my own story, my own perspective and professional journey as a Learning Technologist, an Anthropologist, an Artist, Star Trek fan, a carer and a woman. Some of you may be familiar with the OER Conferences that we organise and with the wonderful work of Kate Bowles who gave one of the keynotes at OER19 this year entitled ‘A quilt of stars: time, work and open pedagogy’. Kate and many other speakers and participants created a strong narrative of hope, a thread of open practice that stitches us together, a tapestry, a patchwork, a weaving together. In her blog post about the conference, Kate described her reflections as “a scrap of practice that makes sense through the labour of others who take time to read it, think about it, share it, ask questions of it, extend it” and I feel her words eloquently highlight all the invisible work, the unbilled effort, that is so often crucial to making change happen, from grassroots activism to academic practice.

    And this message of hope and kindness very much inspired my year. It reminds me that … we are all more than the data we create and our professional practice is more than can be tracked in time spent, papers marked or support tickets answered. Our practice becomes fully realised when we adopt a more mature and reflective, a more critical perspective that is informed by our stories and recognises the importance of the labour of others. Communities such as ALT are key to us collaborating and communicating in order to create a future for Learning Technology that is more open and equitable for all, to weave that tapestry of hope and humanity.”

  • Virtual Teams: CPD and CO2

    Welcome to this month’s post (cross-posted here) in which we, that is Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey) and Maren Deepwell (@marendeepwell), openly share our approach to leading a virtual team. 

    If you haven’t come across our work before or like to find out more, you can catch up on earlier posts on our blogs, podcasts or find out more about ALT, the organisation we work for.

    This time we talk about staff benefits and CPD opportunities for virtual teams, the environmental impact of work travel and discuss the advantages of connecting both virtually and in person. 

    November

    Maren: we’ve done two new pieces of work recently: creating a new guide about what benefits our organisation offers to staff and running the first couple of team sprints. Before now, the information about staff benefits was in quite a few different places and drawing it all together into one doc really brought home to me how much there is! What’s particularly interesting is to look at it from the perspective of leading a virtual team. Funding staff to attend training or CPD events for instance doesn’t in essence change – but it does make a difference where an individual lives, and subsequently which activities make for viable choices in terms of logistics and/or offer opportunities for meeting up in person for a catch up and so forth. Another realisation for me was how much more we now offer in contrast to a few years ago, when our organisation was still hosted within a university. As a team of less than 10 people, being hosted within a large building, a big institution, there was a much stronger reliance on whatever was already being offered, and often that did not meet our requirements. Subsequently a lot of the mandatory CPD felt a bit pointless but used up time. Something you added to the guide was how ALT supports staff to undertake mentoring. I was lucky to have an amazing mentor for many years and I really valued the work we did together. Looking back I realise that my mentor’s support was partly so essential because our internal set up didn’t actually offer what I really needed in my role. Much of what my mentor and I worked on was to navigate the structures we were working within and ultimately to move our organisation away from them. Now, I feel, we offer much more relevant benefits and flexible opportunities such as our weekly show & tell sessions at team meetings, CPD at team days, in-house training and recently virtual team sprints. 

    Martin: Your comment on staff attending CPD opportunities and where the person lives got me thinking. October/November turned out to be an exceptionally busy month for me in terms of travel. As well as our two day staff and Board meeting in London we were also at OEB in Berlin. In terms of my personal CPD I also had a weekend in Sunnyvale, CA for the Google Developer Experts Summit and various weekend excursions to present as part of DevFest. My Summit attendance was supported by ALT with time off, Google picking up the bill for travel and accommodation. I was embarrassed to tell people I was jumping on the plane for California for the weekend and in my heart felt it was the last time I could make that particular trip given the environmental impact it causes. The thought I have is with the predicted increase in flexible working are virtual or hybrid events becoming more feasible. With a growing proportion of the population confident with a virtual presence what does this look like in terms of conferences? You could perhaps argue it both ways, whilst traditional conferences have greater environmental impact when incorporated into a virtual teams calendar they provide opportunities for social interaction at the levels you can’t currently achieve with technology. ALT has personal experience of a range of delivery modes, both live streaming and supporting remote participation at our face-to-face events as well as fully online events such as the ALT Online Winter Conference, which starts next week and is free to attend. At the end of the day we are incredibly social animals and sometimes you can’t beat just hanging out, in the physical sense, with others. Something to also remember is ALT has a UK wide network of regional members groups and I wonder if there is more we can do to either support these by shifting the balance away from one big annual conference to regional events with an emphasis on allowing those from further afield to fully participate?   

    Maren: Reflecting on my personal experience, I’ve been on five long(ish) haul flights in the past ten years if you count flights within Europe, and since I started working for ALT in 2008, I’ve attended fewer than 15 events outside of the UK, on average 1-2 a year since I became CEO. Nearly every journey I take is by train and the majority of our team never travel outside of the UK for work. In contrast to countries like the US or Canada, the distances we generally have to manage are tiny and more often than not the majority of us can avoid air travel all together. So from the perspective of our team, I feel we have the right balance … When it comes to larger events, we only run 2 international face to face events a year and probably 50-75 regional or online ones – both centrally and locally organised. Whilst our biggest event of the year does attract an international audience the majority of participants come from the UK and travel by train. The OER conference is probably the event with most air miles to its name, with maybe 50-100 international travellers. And just like you and many of the participants I value that opportunity to connect in person very much. Some of the people who influence my thinking most I might only see once in a blue moon and whilst I share the environmental concerns you highlight, I think there are other strategies to address that at the scale on which we operate … My thoughts are now turning to planning for 2020 and making the most effective logistical plan for meeting in person as a team is a big challenge. Wherever possible I try to plan in such a way so as to save extra travel and combine trips, eg board meetings and site visits or conferences and team catch ups, appraisals and strategy days and so forth. The blended approach we have means that we can find affordances for both modes of working, rather than having to rigidly stick to one way of doing things. On a personal note, I have lived in a different country or far away from most of my family and friends for all of my adult life. For me, being able to connect in person has always been important and whilst I am now more capable than ever before to do so virtually, it doesn’t mean the same to me, neither in a personal context nor at work. I am not sure I would say one is better than the other and I would regret having to give up either. 

    Martin: I thought I’d do some maths – so working from home rather than my nearest city is approximately 1 tonne of CO2 (according to carbonfootprint.com) which is almost the same as 4 return flights from Edinburgh to London. I’m probably a couple of return flights over in terms of zero gain, but if I opt for rail I could reduce my personal carbon footprint substantially. One of the reasons I often end up on a flight is a combination of needing to be somewhere for an early start and unable to travel the day before as it’s an extra day we have to work out childcare cover. Anyway, this is all very much an aside, but discussing this has made me realise that I need to consider how I travel in 2020, but perhaps there is also something we can agree as a team to make rail travel easier like agreeing a later start time for staff days? Sometimes the small things can make big differences. If we agree on this it will be another detail in our staff handbook which after two years still feels like a robust document without getting lost in bureaucracy. Recently following a request that came into our inboxes I published the ‘ALT Virtual Teams Stack’, which summarised some of the main technology and services we use as part of our distributed team. Again it’s nice to start thinking beyond 2019 knowing we have a well established set of technology and services to build on what we do in 2020 and beyond. As part of our discussions for our next strategy for 2020-2025 one of the questions raised was evolution or revolution. With our infrastructure I feel it’s in a good place so I feel it makes more sense to continue to evolve (our decision to predominantly use Chromebooks also make us more energy efficient). Looking to 2020 and beyond I am looking forward to getting us on the Eduroam network and larger monitors, energy efficient ones of course. Next month we also have a podcast special where we had a chance to speak to Olaf Hubel who is a team leader at Google for the G Suite Developer Relations team, which has thrown up lots of useful guidance so stay tuned for the recording and our reflections.

  • Talking about leading a Virtual Team #OEB19

    Nice to CC you by @visualthinkery is licenced under CC-BY-SA. Remixed by Maren Deepwell.

    This is a special #OEB19 post (cross-posted here) sharing our conference session: Leading Change through Open Conversational Digital Practice. In the session the two of us, that is Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey) and Maren Deepwell (@marendeepwell), openly share our approach to leading a virtual team. 

    As a senior staff team working in educational technology we have worked for the past two years to develop a conversational digital professional practice that enables us to focus on mission-led innovation, develop an open approach to leadership and to lead our virtual team, both digitally and geographically distributed. 

    In our session we discussed why this kind of practice should happen in the open and why it is important; why and how you, as a learning professional/educator, can try to adopt this approach; and what the barriers you may encounter are. 

    You can access the full slide deck here: https://go.alt.ac.uk/tts242 . 

    Do you have your own approaches to open leadership or working in or leading virtual teams you would like to share? If so we’d love to hear from you. Comments on Martin’s blog are open or you can reach us on Twitter @mhawksey and @marendeepwell.

  • Is a strategy all about the future?!

    Creating strategies is a big part of my work. Some are small and fit a particular purpose, others span an entire organisation and many years. It’s the second kind that I am currently working on as ALT is half way through setting out a new strategy for 2020-2025.

    Our process involves many people, with their own views, ideas and voices and it’s all the richer for it. ALT’s Chair, Sheila, and I, blog about our progress regularly and if you haven’t already, I would encourage you to engage and make your voice heard.

    For me, this new strategy will be a living, breathing, practical framework for pretty much everything I work on for the next five years, just as the last one has been. So every ounce of effort, every speck of gold dust that I can help channel into it now, is going to make a big difference further down the line.

    A lot of my thinking as ALT’s chief executive develops alongside and through the wider consultation process with our Board of Trustees, staff, Members and the wider network. But there are some things I think through on an individual basis.

    For example, when I applied for my job in 2012, part of the interview process involved giving a presentation about my vision for ALT. I still have that slide deck…

    Since then, ever few years when we start to write a new strategy, I sit down, and I prepare another presentation pretending to be applying for my job all over again.
    It’s a useful tool I find. It helps me to step outside of what I think I already know about the organisation and try to see it with fresh eyes. It prompts me to ignore all practicalities and focus on vision instead. As a new ceo you never quite know what you are going to inherit. How many skeletons in the closet.. how much willingness to change.. what kind of internal agendas that dictate what can and cannot happen. You have an excuse to clean house, to start from a blank slate.  A new strategy has a similar power… it can help reset the board. It gives you the freedom to start afresh. It’s an exciting moment.

    As we began working on the strategy, one of my colleagues asked me whether a strategy is all about the future. That’s a very useful question. I suppose, in a practical sense, much of the strategy itself will focus on what’s ahead. But in many ways I don’t think creating a strategy is all about the future because you also want to understand, learn from and build on where you have already been. Making meaningful progress and change depends on not ignoring what you already know, problems you have already identified. In many ways it’s the opposite of what Sir Humphries does in Yes, Minister in order to manage his Ministers. Dusting off the same old idea and repackaging it in brand new marketing is a successful way of avoiding change whilst always hailing the next big thing. It doesn’t challenge the status quo.

    Change is good to think about in the context of strategies. The more radical your vision, the more work it takes to bring everyone with you. The more things change, the more effort it takes to communicate that change and make everyone notice. Here’s where working closely with the tech sector is not always an easy thing because the narratives of change in technology tend to be about shininess, all about seamless transitions and problem solving. Often I come across sexy must have solutions to problems I didn’t know existed. That’s the kind of change that’s easy to buy in to, literally. Change that takes years to plan and longer to bed in and real effort to implement for years and at scale is far less sexy and so much more meaningful for an organisation like mine. That’s why looking at the landscape, listening to what’s at the heart of the community, taking time to step back and really look at where we’ve come from is so valuable.

    I like to dabble in doing some development work. I can’t do the really tech heavy bits, but I like doing design, documentation and bug testing. Sometimes I get too ambitious about how many things can be improved or changed in one iteration, and getting others to test the workflow is a good way of identifying those things and improving the design in response. Strategies are quite similar for me. I start from a point of where I can see we will be in 5 years time and then work backwards until my ideas converge with everyone else’s. Sticking with my tech metaphor, the strategy becomes like a user interface for where we are headed.

    The last time we created a strategy the process taught me much about the value of listening and collaborating, of what can be achieved when you work together, share power and responsibility. It was an rewarding experience for me on a personal basis as well as greatly beneficial for the organisation. It also taught me the value of setting aside time to dream about the future.

  • Virtual Teams: Strategy unpacked… how being a virtual team is changing our organisation

    Welcome to this month’s post (cross-posted here) in which we, that is Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey) and Maren Deepwell (@marendeepwell), openly share our approach to leading a virtual team. 

    This time we talk about how much strategic progress we have made in the last few years and how being a virtual team has contributed to that. We also discuss our values as an organisation, how we have tried to reduce our impact on the environment and the upsides of being geographically distributed. 

    New here? Catch up on earlier posts, podcasts or find out more about ALT. 

    September 

    Maren: in our last podcast we talked about approaching our second anniversary of becoming a distributed team. Given that it took a year to execute the transition it was about this time three years ago that the strategy for this organisational change was set out. We are currently in the process of reviewing our strategy so this seems like a good time to take stock: let’s start with money. Financial efficiency was not a key driver for becoming a digitally and geographically distributed organisation but it was part of our strategy to spend less of our resources on renting under-utilised office space and all the costs associated with it, and instead increase resources for the services we provide to our members. Even taking into account one off transition costs, we have been able to redistribute between 5-10% of our annual turnover and that has begun to make a real positive difference to our budget each year. In this series we often focus on our experience of leading a distributed team day to day and in our last podcast we discussed how the distributed nature of our work has become a benefit to how we deliver events. It’s interesting for me to take a step back and see what other benefits it has delivered. Another example is our aim to recruit staff located in many different parts of the UK in order to better collaborate with our national community. We have previously talked about the positive experience of recruiting for our virtual team and how being independent of location has enabled us to attract a much wider pool of high calibre applicants. 

    Image credit: Voronoi by @visualthinkery is licenced under CC-BY-SA.

    Whilst a charity with a staff team of six can’t cover all parts of the country, we are now far more geographically distributed and able to travel to local events and meetings than before. In contrast to only two years ago when nearly the whole team was Oxford based and our ability to support remote working was limited, our reach has significantly increased! That’s two big wins: more financial resources for what matters most and more people power where it makes a difference. 

    Martin: It’s interesting to reflect on the bigger picture and the differences from 2-3 years ago. Something I’ve not analysed but is at the back of my mind is differences in travel and in particular air travel. With a team located across the country more travel is required for us all to come together. We try to be efficient in terms using other commitments like the face-to-face events we run our our Board meetings to minimise additional travel. In terms of whether we are generating more carbon emissions the calculation is complicated because when our office was located in Oxford I would fly down approximately once a month. In a distributed team my need to meet face-to-face is less frequent, but there are more of us to move around the country. In terms of carbon cost none of us need to commute to work. As a distributed team we’ve also greatly reduced our print requirements moving to a virtual filing system. Even our expenses are entirely electronic and we’ve no need to print or post receipts. Some of our changes are by design, others are born from practicalities. For example, I know that you will often take the train for events in Scotland because it is impractical for you to get to an airport. For this year’s Annual Conference it was fortunately on my doorstep making it easier to transport the equipment we require. How much equipment we need varies from event to event, but with the environmental impact or air travel I’m rethinking how our get to our events and meetups. 

    Maren: I suppose it’s all relative.. and there is always more we can do – but having reviewed our operations over the past 3 years, we can see that we have definitely reduced our impact on the environment overall. A different kind of strategic change I’ve been thinking about and which relates directly to our organisational values is creating and using openly licenced content, anything from our strategy documents, call for proposals, photos from events, artworks, member badges and more. The call for proposals and guidance for reviewers have been adopted by other conferences and remixed to fit their purpose, whilst some of our policies, such as our privacy policy, and governance documents have likewise been used by other organisations and referenced back to us. We have also been working with Visual Thinkery to create a number of remixes and those often take on a life of their own in the wider community. For me, these are examples of how our values shape our operations and a contrast to how ALT operated when I first joined. In a recent blog post Frances Bell wrote about her sense of the Association being a generous organisation and that made me reflect on how generosity is a big part of our approach to leadership and one of the motivations behind our open practice. 

    Martin: I’d also read Frances’ post and it was interesting to reflect on whether having a virtual team with an inclination towards “generalised reciprocity” makes things easier. In terms of qualities I think it does make a difference to have people willing to support others particularly when contact time in a distributed team can reduce those serendipitous ‘watercooler’ moments – this is not so say those opportunities don’t happen instead they take place in other spaces, there however has to be a willingness and culture that values sharing and values supporting others.

    Just coming back to the environmental factors for homeworkers. We’ve previously talked about the advantages of working from and having more control on your working environment. At the recent Labour Conference shadow equalities minister Dawn Butler announced a proposed policy which is designed to consider the specific needs of menopausal women in the workplace. As part of this “adjustments that employers could be required to make could include the provision of ventilation facilities”. There are a number of factors that can affect your personal thermal comfort level and research has shown there can be biological gender differences. As the colder weather arrives, so does the annual team chat about our individual workplace temperatures, which can bring its own challenges. These are not just limited to personal comfort levels.  From the Wikipedia page on thermal comfort:

    Residential buildings in particular can vary much more in thermal comfort than public and commercial buildings. This is due to their smaller size, the variations in clothing worn, and different uses of each room.

    So as our team starts the ‘discussions’ with partners over the thermostat there are plenty of opportunities for us to show some generosity towards each other … and pictures of snuggly pets.      

    Maren: I have lots of thoughts about how the seasons impact on homeworkers and on balance I much prefer a working environment in which you can feel the changes in the weather and adjust accordingly instead of being at the mercy of a centrally controlled heating system or indeed working in a building where you can’t open the windows.

    What really struck me however is you talking about an organisational culture that values sharing and values supporting others. I recently had a conversation with the Chair of our Board of Trustees, Sheila MacNeill, where this came up strongly and it resonates, too, with what Martin Weller wrote recently in a post on ‘meticulous informality’. The point I am getting at is that our values, as an organisation, are very practical, day to day elements of how we lead our team and how we operate and leverage them to achieve our strategic aims. And more than that, our values as an organisation and the core principle of our professional accreditation scheme are closely aligned:

    When we set out to define our shared values in 2016 I didn’t fully consider how these elements connect with each other. Now I think that this is one of the most interesting areas to think about and there’s a lot we could unpack here, for example how openness enables us to critically examine the interplay between technology & learning or how ALT being independent of government and industry supports effective (and less biased) sharing of practice. You recently achieved your accreditation (and blogged about it) and I wonder whether you have any thoughts on this, as you work as a Learning Technologist in a senior role? 

    Martin: It’s really interesting to consider how our values and core principles interact with each other and influence what we do, including as a virtual team. In terms of openness for me I can’t see a direct link to critically examining the interplay of learning and technology … just because you value openness doesn’t mean you have a more critical eye. Generally I do however believe those who value openness are more considered in what they do. As someone who has been blogging for over a decade I developed a level of comfort in publishing things in the open. I’ve published a variety of content from thought pieces to practical tutorials and there is still always an aspect of how it will be judged by my peers but at the same time the consequences of publishing something that is wrong are fairly low. In the case of my peer reviewed portfolio for CMALT the stakes are higher, you are seeking accreditation of your knowledge and skills.  In my case I deliberately chose to do my portfolio privately, only publishing it once I knew I had passed. I know others who have very successfully developed their portfolios in the open getting feedback, encouragement and contributions as they produce it. For a number of years my philosophy was that everything should be done in the open, but more recently this has become more nuanced and I now recognise that learning can be a very vulnerable process often referring to Alec Couros’ ‘thinning of the walls’ in my presentations on this topic.  In the context of virtual teams it is perhaps useful to think in a similar way. Aspects of virtual teams can for some expose vulnerabilities and discomfort, for example, most video conferencing applications include a preview of your webcam which some people might find discomforting – when you meet face-to-face it is very unlikely that the person you are speaking to will hold up a mirror so you see yourself.

  • Virtual Teams: The perfect blend? Bringing the skills of distributed teams to face-to-face events (special podcast edition)

    Welcome to this month’s post (cross-posted here) in which we, that is Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey) and Maren Deepwell (@marendeepwell), openly share our approach to leading a virtual team.

    This time we talk about how we as a digitally and geographically distributed team connect face to face and why we think a blended approach is important. 

    New here? Catch up on earlier posts, podcasts or find out more about ALT. 

    August

    Maren: from the outset our approach to running a virtual team has been blended. In these posts we’ve talked about face to face team days, conference meet ups and even cpd by post – all examples of how we blend virtual working with ‘real world’ elements. What I’d like to talk about is why it’s so valuable to share some coffee & cake in person from time to time – to build relationships, communication & collaboration. I don’t think meeting up in person in itself is enough though. Over the last ten years I’ve come to realise that the more I prepare for a meeting and share my thoughts and expectations with whomever I am meeting, the more I get out of the time spent together. In my case, my former line manager, my mentor and every Chair I’ve reported to as CEO have been distributed remotely and rare face to face meetings have been precious. In order to make the most of them, I reflect on how things are going, how I feel, beforehand, so that I am better able to convey what I want to say when I am meeting someone in person. I’m curious about how that can also apply to conferences or other events. This year I was fortunate to meet many Canadian colleagues I’d never met before in person and I spent a lot of time chatting with them online in advance. I received travel tips & help preparing for the trip and it really made a big difference to how well the trip went and our ability to work together easily once I arrived. I think what I am getting at is that often people assume it’s the physical proximity that makes the difference in communication or collaboration and I’m keen to explore why it’s more nuanced than that. Some of the most important communication in my experience has been entirely online and depended more on the effort and engagement of those involved than their location. And yet… you can’t beat working alongside someone for learning new keyboard shortcuts. I realise that is a small thing, but it always reminds me that there are some things you miss out on in virtual working. So that’s my opening for this month’s podcast. What do you want to talk about? 

    Martin: Having just delivered our biggest annual face-to-face event with over 450 attendees joining us for our Annual Conference the benefits of physically coming together is at the forefront of my mind. This is one of the few times of the year when we come together as a team. The conference itself is usually over a year’s worth of planning and there are as you can imagine a lot of moving parts. The majority of the conference preparation is done as a distributed team and we’ve previously talked about how this works as a virtual team. Something that I thought really clicked together this year was our team communication during the event. As part of the conference we had to manage the attendee experience across multiple venues. To do this effectively, our team is spread across the conference site. We have a very detailed run plan so you generally know where each team member is going to be at a particular time, but to coordinate things we have a group Google Hangout chat channel. With this we can share how the conference is going, note any issues, answer quick questions or highlight the need for refreshment/breaks:

    We’ve previously tried to use Google Hangouts chat as part of our events administration, but this year was the first time I felt it really worked. There were a couple of reasons I felt this worked better this year, in particular, given we use Google Hangouts chat in our day-to-day activity we were all very familiar with this tool and how to use it. Another important factor was that this was the first year we also took the time to make sure we could access the chat regardless of whether we were on a Chromebook/laptop or using our mobile devices. Often when Virtual Teams are discussed it feels like you are always arguing against how it compromises operations. In the case of our Annual Conference our experience of working in a distributed team I feel actually greatly benefits us.

    Maren: that’s an interesting point. Initially I suppose it was mostly the other way round, ie existing relationships or knowledge made it easier to establish an effective virtual working environment. As this is our second year as a distributed team I think you are right about our virtual working practices becoming a benefit to working together face to face. I’ve really noticed the difference in my own mindset, I no longer feel like I haven’t seen a colleague for a long time when I see them in person. Instead our last virtual interaction ‘counts’ in my mind. That makes building relationships a lot easier, because you are not starting from scratch every few months. Another factor that has changed is mandating what’s required and what is optional. When we set up virtual operations we offered a lot of choice in terms of which platforms, tools or devices to use and the first two years have helped us, as a team, determine what is essential for effective operations such as the instant chat on different devices and what’s up to the individual, such as personal to do list formats. Delivering events has been a big part of helping us figure that out. The other big factor in such a small team is having a sufficient number of people present to check whether your idea of how things should run actually works. When there is only two or three people engaging it doesn’t work as well. In a small team one individual may represent 20% of the overall team and so everyone’s actions have a big impact. For example, for me personally that makes a big difference when it comes to sharing priorities for upcoming catch up meetings. Initially I was happy for everyone to choose a format but over time I realised that it takes too much time to switch between all the different tools for lists that are shared and having a common format also means that we all learn from each other’s practice, like the keyboard shortcuts I mentioned earlier. 

    Martin: As our team has grown I can see the benefits of having standardisation. As part of my role I support the implementation of our infrastructure. This includes the physical purchase of equipment as well as supporting staff with how to use it. Broadly the technology we use is fairly standard with a mix of Windows laptops/desktop and Chromebooks. Generally where practical we repurchase the same product or a similar product from the manufacture. This makes things easier so for example in the case of Windows laptops we have variants on the Lenovo X200 series so I know how the software Lenovo provides to manage device hardware generally works. The same is true for Chromebooks and we currently predominantly ASUS Chromebook Flip C302s. It means I generally know what USB-C hubs to buy as well which monitors have suitable connections and adjustments. As I’m not a day-to-day Chromebook user an area I struggle more is shortcut and command keys but luckily we’ve got a good cross-section of experience in the team now so if I can’t help there is generally someone else who can point us in the right direction. An area I’m often left in the dark with is iOS (for the last decade I’ve been exclusively using Android based devices). At ALT, we don’t have a policy of providing mobile devices to staff, the exception being our events manager. In the case of our recent Annual Conference it meant when one of our team asked how to install Google Hangouts chat on their iPhone I was completely lost, but fortunately as you are an iOS user you were able to help. The desire for a standardised provision is likely to be the wish of every IT manager in the land, in a distributed team it perhaps becomes more important because remote support of physical things becomes much harder. Similarly, I can see why having a common format for catch-ups means time better spent.