Maren Deepwell

Tag: #blogging4life

  • The year in blog posts… 2025

    The year in blog posts… 2025

    It is nearly time to wrap up blogging for another year, and I’m feeling all festive. Shout out to Jim Groom, who is blogging at all hours in the run up to celebrating 20 years of his bavatuesdays blog. Over here on my own domain, things are progressing at a more leisurely pace, and it’s time to look at what’s been happening on the blog over the course of the year.

    In 2023 I posted 72 posts on here, and last year I made it to 65, and this year has been another excellent year with 61 posts. Although this era of tracking everything makes one feel that all progress curves should be going up, not down, I am delighted that I have kept up my blogging practice for another year.

    It’s becoming harder to make ones voice heard across federated, fragmented social spaces, and I don’t use this site to bring everything together, so every post I share elsewhere isn’t counted (and that’s OK).

    Instead, I am excited to look back at my year in blogging here, sharing what’s interesting to me, what I am working on and whatever else I come across that makes me curious.

    January (6 posts)

    February (6 posts)

    March (7 posts)

    April (4 posts)

    May (6 posts)

    June (4 posts)

    July (5 posts)

    August (4 posts)

    September (3 posts)

    October (6 posts)

    November (5 posts)

    December (5 posts)

    • Choose your own adventure
    • This post
    • Office Party for One (unpublished)
    • The year in review (unpublished)
    • Last post of the year (unpublished)

    As always, thank you for reading. And commenting. Here’s to the last three posts of the year. Coming soon.

    Share, like & subscribe 😉

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  • Conference post #ReclaimOpen25

    Conference post #ReclaimOpen25

    I’m taking part in the Reclaim Open Conference this week, and my contribution is for the blog-a-thon. If you’ve landed on my blog for the first time, howdy! Welcome!

    I’ve been blogging here since 2008 and I also send out a free monthly newsletter and host a podcast about hybrid working and leading in distributed organisations. I work as a consultant and coach with non-profits and small organisations, mainly in education and technology.

    If you are a returning visitor, great to see you!

    Here is my conference post in full, and a big THANK YOU to Bryan Mathers who captured the visual thought for the session and created this lovely image that now heads up the post!

    Blogging as a professional practice superpower

    A really common issue for leaders in Higher Ed and elsewhere is worrying about “is it just me who is struggling with this?”. When everyone works from home and all you see is a carefully curated or blurred background with a professional, well-groomed headshot framed by a flattering camera angle, it can be hard to get a sense of how others are coping day to day and easy to feel that you are the only one who is struggling.

    I think this is where blogging can not only help, it can become a professional practice superpower.

    Open practice in a leadership position is different from sharing things like new publications, or blogging about exciting projects. Many professionals in leadership roles maintain public profiles or a web presence like a blog. What I’m interested in is not necessarily about having a blog, but about the practice of blogging in itself.

    The process of getting whatever you want to say in a post and press publish.

    It’s about the joy of blogging, the sheer exuberance of having a space, a domain, to make your own. A vault or a personal archive as I’ve blogged about before.

    It opens up a space to share the practice of leading, of managing people, not just the end results – and the reflective space it opens up can be incredibly powerful.

    There are however some barriers to blogging, especially in a leadership role. When you are everyone’s boss, it’s not always easy to maintain an authentic space on the open web. So I use a couple of strategies to blog about my professional practice, specifically:

    Choose a format that works: I vary how and where I blog, from my main WordPress site to voice recordings.

    Modify how openly to share: from public, to semi-private to fully locked-down depending on topic.

    Keep a list for the long term: I could use a tool to track projects, publications and other activities for me, but there’s great value for me in the act of processing what I have done and reflecting on it as I make and update the list.

    To conclude, I also want to share one more strategy that I have found particularly useful over the years, which is to engage in conversational blogging, or co-leadership conversations. There are a range of conversational approaches that I have used to create the space needed to reflect together and blogging can be a great tool for that, too.

    Thanks for reading my contribution to Reclaim Open 🙂

    More to read and listen to:

  • #ReclaimOpen25 Here we come!

    #ReclaimOpen25 Here we come!

    It’s nearly time for Reclaim Open, and it’ll be my first time taking part in this special conference. You can read all about the conference on the Reclaim Blog, or take a look at the documentary that premiered at the last Reclaim Open. Taylor Jadin shared this with me recently and I LOVED watching it.

    About the video: As Reclaim Hosting welcomes its 10th year, we’ve been doing a lot of reflecting on the principles that got us here. Namely, the open web. The Reclaim Open conference is all about that concept, and we want to capture it in as many meaningful and lasting ways as possible. We don’t want this documentary to only capture Reclaim’s thoughts on the open web, but to invite and include the amazing community joining us here to document their own perspectives and stories about this topic.

    What I’m most looking forward to (many things)

    There is A LOT to look forward to… so in no particular order:

    • I’m excited to see the student showcase of the winners of the Reclaim Student Competition
    • There’s the opening keynote by Bonnie Stewart, with the theme “Rewilding voice in a time of enclosure”
    • Also on the plenary schedule is a panel hosted by Jim Groom “On Writing” and as an avid listener/viewer of this series I am especially looking forward to that
    • Not to forget is the amazing artwork created by Bryan Mathers (including the images in this post) and seeing those come to live
    • There are a host of social sessions around the DS106 Daily Create, an Open Education board game and the intriguing sounding “An Archivist goes to the Playground – Exploring and Describing Chicago Park Playgrounds” as well as “Improvising the future of digital storytelling”
    • I am excited to read “My website is a junk drawer” and also “Lessons from Rewilding Landscapes… in the Wild”

    In short, there is not much of the three days I am not looking forward to. And of course there’s also the people to connect with, to chat and share inspiration.

    My session (is a blog post)

    As I am mainly working with the team delivering the conference I didn’t want to present live as well. Luckily the first day of the conference is in a new format, a blog-a-thon, and so I made a submission in the form of a blog post for that instead. If you are wondering what’s involved, here is an explainer to get you started – but one of the joys of working with the team and trying out new things is that whilst we do have a plan, we don’t exactly know all the details up front and there’s a certain level of winging it involved 😉

    I decided to submit a blog post about blogging (of course), specifically about blogging as a superpower in professional practice. My session will be on 4 November and you should check out the full schedule to explore keynote speakers, as well as other presenters and bloggers.

    Join in!

    Register now to join in, November 4-6, as this wonderful community comes together on the open web, via federated social networks, on the radio and on a blog near you. This is one event you don’t want to miss.

    Reclaim Open Logo
  • Conferencing at the cutting edge

    Conferencing at the cutting edge

    Organising conferences is my guilty professional pleasure… . I fell into doing it at various times throughout my career and I thoroughly enjoy it. I like the preparations, the run up and the excitement of delivering an event, whether it’s for several hundred people in a hushed auditorium or a buzzy online crowd with run-away chatter and endless DMs.

    Last year I had an absolute blast working on the DS106 Summer Camp with Jim Groom and his team at Reclaim, and we had the MOST fun delivering a radio based conference. So when this year’s plans for Reclaim Open came along, I jumped at the chance to work together again to re-invent the conference yet again.

    What’s in store

    Reclaim Open’s theme this year, brought to life by the one and only Bryan Mathers is Rewilding the Network – Making New Connections and the conference will take place fully online, so there’s no travel required 🙂

    The event covers three days, from 4-6th November, and registration is now open. Register to attend before September 1, 2025 and get a 33% ‘early bird’ discount, making the conference fee a very affordable $99.

    Make a submission and get involved

    For Reclaim Open, every proposal is also a blog post. We will publish all accepted submissions on the conference blog which will also be the conference schedule. Submissions are now open for the following session streams:

    Your Voice: how do educators and students find and amplify their voices on the open web? How do we make ourselves heard and what are the risks and opportunities in Higher Ed and beyond?

    Your World: Maybe it’s a blog or a domain of one’s own that is your home in the digital realm. Whether it’s all business or rather  hobbies, pets, creative projects, parenting or sports. Share what you care about  on the open web.

    The Tech: the technology that makes it all possible, from open source platforms like WordPress and Ghost, to open infrastructure hosted on ReclaimEDU, this theme is for sharing tech know-how and geeky pursuits.

    The Connections: What brings us together in a world of fragmented social networks and how do you stay connected and find new connections? From self-hosted socials to federated networks, we want to hear about how you make connections.

    The Wildcard: Share your inspiration and creativity. Wild is wonderful.

    There will be radio!

    One of the things I am most looking forward to is the Reclaim Open Blog-A-Thon, a wild mix of radio and blogging fun on the first day of the event. If you are curious what this is all about, read on:

    How it all began

    It all started at the beginning of this year when a few brave souls got together to found Bloggers Anonymous, Reclaim’s Community of Practice for Bloggers in Higher Ed. It started small, with a dedicated channel on Discord, and a monthly meeting. A few of us got to together to talk about blogging, and blog about blogging… and before we knew it the RSS feed that folk were adding their blogs to was pinging with the sound of fresh blog posts, hot off the press. If you’d like to find out more about this Community of Practice, check out the story so far over on the Reclaim Blog.

    So what’s the Blog-A-Thon?

    Now, the Blog-A-Thon is on November 4th, the first day of the conference, and the idea is that we’re going to take to our blogs to read, respond and connect. You’ll be able to find  and navigate between the posts via the conference schedule, and post your comments

    We’re also planning for some good old-fashioned radio coming to you live with bloggers chatting about blogging and playing the soundtrack to their stories.

    If that’s made you curious, head over to the conference site to learn more, and make your submission!

  • Blogging on the Open Web.

    Blogging on the Open Web.

    Since its launch, the new Blogging Community of Practice, AKA Bloggers Anonymous, has begun to grow. Community building is an art that takes time and patience and most of all presence. You have to walk the walk… you have to start spending time where you want to grow connections. Which is not all that simple in times like these.

    Many professionals in my networks are leaving social media and the toxic news cycle behind all together, and being less connected via open networks makes it hard to get the word out about things like this. Which brings me to my motivation for being involved in this project in the first place: it feels more important now than ever before to have your own domain on the web and to keep it alive. My own blog is my space, space for my voice and for my views to be heard. Crucially, it’s my data to keep, to move, to take away, instead of being in the hands of someone else.

    So yes, blogging on the open web. It’s a habit worth keeping up.

    This week’s session: Finding your Blogging Mojo

    I am running a session for the community this week, all about finding (or re-kindling) your blogging mojo. Inspiration for the session originally came from this blog post, in which I shared ideas and practical strategies for getting into the habit of blogging as a practice.

    Recently I have had lots of conversations with folk who would like to blog more, but don’t. Or who feel they *should* be blogging more often, but they haven’t actually managed to do so.

    If that’s you and you are looking for ways to get your blogging mojo back, this post is for you. There’s no judgment here. Just some practical approaches you can try to get (back) to blogging regularly.

    But, first… ask yourself this question: do you want to HAVE A BLOG or do you WANT TO BLOG? These two things, to my mind at least, don’t necessarily mean the same thing. Lots of people, organisations and companies have blogs. Blogs that might function a bit like newsletters, or communicate community updates. A blog can be a really effective tool for communications and marketing, and as such, you might be obliged to blog as part of your job. That’s not the kind of blogging I am talking about in this post.

    This is not about having a blog, but about the practice of blogging itself. The process of getting whatever you want to say in a post and press publish. It’s about the joy of blogging, the sheer exuberance of having a space, a domain, to make your own.

    Next I share how to… start small, thinking about blogging as a practice rather than a “to do” list, building a habit of blogging regularly and share examples of how I keep blogging.

    If you’d like to join the session, come along on Wednesday. Just sign up and you’ll get the joining instructions the day before. We’ll start at midday (ET) or 4pm GMT.

    Curious? Check out what’s happening

    • Join us on Discord
    • #blogging4life is the hashtag social media
    • Subscribe to our blog to keep up to date with what’s happening
    • Come along to our events – which are free and everyone is welcome

    EdTech Bloggers ‘Starter Pack’

    One of the things I am feeling inspired by is seeing folk join a growing collection of edtech bloggers on Bluesky. I love finding out about others’ work, read more posts by folk I don’t usually follow (yet) and also find a sense of fellowship with other bloggers out there. So if you are on Bluesky and you want to join, just ping us and we’ll get you added.

    Listen to the Blogging Special podcast

  • Fresh blogging inspiration

    Fresh blogging inspiration

    It’s an exciting time for blogging as Reclaim’s newly established Blogging Community of Practice, AKA Bloggers Anonymous, is gathering momentum. If you are interested in learning more and maybe getting involved, check out the details at the bottom of this post.

    EdTech Bloggers ‘Starter Pack’

    One of the things I am feeling inspired by is seeing folk join a growing collection of edtech bloggers on Bluesky. I love finding out about others’ work, read more posts by folk I don’t usually follow (yet) and also find a sense of fellowship with other bloggers out there.

    Blogging about blogging

    Alongside this I am super grateful to Lorna Campbell for putting together this very useful post “For those about to blog”. I always appreciate reading Lorna’s posts, and this one is especially timely as it brings together some useful advice and resources for anyone looking for practical advice or straightforward inspiration for blogging.

    Lorna puts it so well:

    As the social media landscape has become increasingly toxic and fragmented, people are increasingly seeking other channels to share their ideas and practice, connect with their peers, and build community.  As a result, there’s been a welcome resurgence in blogging, newsletters and small-scale podcasting over the last year or so.  These forms of communication are less tied to specific social media platforms, giving creators more control over work and who they share it with.  At times like these it’s been really encouraging to see familiar communities and independent voices reemerging across the web.  So if you’re new to blogging, or if you need a boost to get started again, here’s some resources that might help.

    Definitely a recommended read!

    Join Reclaim’s Blogging Community of Practice

    There is a dedicated channel set up in Reclaim’s Discord Community Space. This is a friendly social space where everyone is welcome and which is free to join.

    Get started