As I have been working on my book Leading Virtual Teams, I have been talking about working remotely on DS106 Radio on the Remote Working Radio Show.
What has started out as a lot of music and a bit of chat from me and sharing updated on the book has grown into an hour of chat with special guests, exploring how we work from home, what challenges we encounter and tips for developing your own practice.
The show is taking a break over the summer, so here are the recordings from season 1 for you to catch up with and enjoy. A huge thank you to my guests who joined me on air and shared their insights.
We will be back on air in the autumn for season 2.
Wow. It’s really happening. This time, we are hitting not only the virtual but also the physical road again in order to journey to the OER Conference. OER22 here we come!
The last time the OER Conference took place as planned as in Galway in 2019, and since that time, three years ago, no edition of this very special event has gone to plan. In 2020, OER20 pivoted online with less than two weeks to go, and became very much a pandemic conference. In the crisis mood of those early days of the pandemic, OER20 became a free event with refunds winging their ways across the globe to participants who suddenly had a lot more to worry about than a cancelled conference.
Helloooer CC-BY Bryan Mathers
When I look back at the posts and reflections from that year, it really hits me how much the world changed for all of us, and for this event as well. Our small staff team worked wonders to make this one happen.
In 2021 we did plan to hold OER online, and then decided to join forces with the Domains Conference from Reclaim Hosting, bringing two communities together for what turned out to be… a journey into the wonderful unknown. OERxDomains21 was born.
Title image from the OERxDomains21 programme
I organise, speak at and go to a lot of different conferences of all shapes and sizes. Each conference has its own way of working, and there are some big differences between them.
The OER Conference feels to me very much like a labour of love. It has its own voices, its own way of interpreting the criteria for peer review, its own priorities of what is important and what is not.
I have had the privilege of being involved in organising this event since 2015 and in that time I have learnt much about the generosity of the people who shape this event, their shared passion for open education and the values that connect them.
Inspired by the OER Conference I became an open practitioner and an open leader myself. I joined the community that this conference supports here in the UK and increasingly in other countries, too. Through the OER Conference I made connections with others who lead important work in this space, and I am grateful to be part of an expanding network, a community that is coming together again this week.
We are coming together in person and online to recharge and re-connect. To share, learn and discuss. I am so excited to see friends, colleagues and new acquaintances in person and online. For those who are unable to take part, there will be a lot of OER Conference goodness openly shared and disseminated after the event, adding to what is now a substantial collection of videos and resources.
Let there be penguins!
As you may have noticed by now, the GO-GN Penguins have taken over OER22 for this year, and they are truly everywhere, both online and in the physical world. I recently shared a True Story of how a Westminster meeting led to… penguins. I am deeply grateful to the creative, collaborative and collegiate minds at Visual Thinkery and at GO-GN for helping us bring this year’s event to life with these penguins centre stage. Usually I am more of a shoe(tweet) sort of conference goer, but I must admit that the penguin theme defeated my shoe selection… so I went a little overboard and decided to go fully ‘on brand’ in a different way for OER22.
A photo of my hand with painted nails, one of which is an image of a penguin
… and there is a session, too
In the last bit of the programme on Thursday, I am excited to actually get to lead a session in the programme! Long-time colleague and friend Lauren Hanks, Director of Operations at Reclaim Hosting and one of the Co-Chairs of last year’s edition of the OER Conference, and I, are getting together to reflect on the connections between open education and open approaches to online collaboration and work.
Title slide for our session: Open in action – building connections in virtual teams.
As leaders of virtual teams, we want to critically examine what lessons we can learn from open approaches to learning and teaching and how we can use that knowledge in an increasingly virtual workplace.
This session builds on a recent episode of the Remote Work Show on DS106 Radio, in which we started to unpack some of this (recording to follow).
This week I am chairing a discussion about ALT’s development of a framework for Ethical Learning Technology with a wonderful line up of speakers: ALT’s Chair, Professor Helen O’Sullivan, Javiera Atenas whose work helped shape the framework and our President, David White. Each will bring a different perspective to the conversation, helping us explore why taking an ethical approach to digital education is important for leaders, professional and academic staff and, first and foremost, students.
Since it’s initial launch in September last year, ALT’s Framework for Ethical Learning Technology (FELT) has continued to develop with input from Members and the wider community. The first part of the work is that we are collecting case studies and examples of policies from across sectors to help establish a baseline of practice and also of gaps in practice, of questions or problems to which we don’t have robust answers as yet. The second part of the work we have focused on is the development of resources that help individuals and teams translate the framework into practice. The first resources, our FELT Reflective Self-Assessment, launched at the end of 2021:
You can use this assessment tool to reflect on a particular project, a new tool or platform or you can use it to focus on a particular aspect of your work. We encourage all Learning Technology professionals to undertake this self-assessment to reflect on their professional practice in relation to FELT’s four core areas. Based on the outcome, you can then move on to complete individual sections focused on particular aspects of your practice. The self-assessment is mapped to the CMALT accreditation framework and this is indicated throughout the assessment.
These resources form the start of our efforts to put the framework into practice, and the session this week will enable us to share these more widely as well as exploring why it’s important in different contexts.
As many of us are emerging into some sort of post-pandemic way of working, we need to make some space for considering the ethical dimension of digital practices in our strategies and the FELT framework can offer a practical starting point for exactly those conversations for institutions, teams, with students and with industry.
… and returning to in person conferences
Like many, I am just about to make my first steps back to in person conferences. It feels like closing a loop, the “what I last did two years ago” loop. Part of my role as a CEO is to represent my organisation and share the work we do and the voice of our Members on the best possible platforms. For the past two years, that has been a lot harder than it used to be, and there is a whole dimension of networking and influencing that has been absent from much of my day to day work during the time of online only events.
Like many, I have mixed feelings about the return of travelling for work, partly because here in Wales we continue to have more restrictions in place than is the case in England. But mainly I am grateful to have the opportunity to represent my organisation again, to have the option of generating engagement (and income) through running events both in person and online and, most of all, to reconnect with colleagues who inspire me and who contribute to my enjoyment of my work.
Given how much of my professional practice is online, I know what really, really great virtual work looks like. I experience it every week. And I also know how much effort and time and resources it takes to make it happen, and that relatively few people have either the skills or the set up to make it work consistently.
So I am looking forward to returning to the comparatively ‘easier’ way of connecting in person. And, in just over a month, to dancing with penguins…
