Respect. Justice. Equality. Most of us aim to embody and enact these values in the work we do, in all our interactions, in all the spaces we inhabit. In a world of increasing inequality, these values demand much of us — especially white people in relation to racism. The quote in the image above is…
As the COVID-19 virus crisis worsens, the local/global and personal/professional boundaries (already admittedly thin) have been obliterated almost entirely this week. Yesterday (March 12) Ireland’s Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, announced new measures to combat Covid-19 in Ireland. These include closing all schools, colleges, universities and childcare facilities until March 29, at least, as well as limiting…
I am starting 2020 quietly and reflectively, and as ever, hopeful for the year ahead. It has been a year of many changes. Impossible to capture it all, but as the year turns I want to mark some milestones of 2019. Working with the National Forum At the start of 2019, I’d been in my…
It has been a whirlwind, a unique learning experience, and a privilege to work these past 14 months with my OER19 co-chair Laura Czerniewicz, with ALT‘s star team of Maren Deepwell, Martin Hawksey and Jane Marsh, with a fabulous conference committee and Galway planning team and with a global network of open educators, researchers, and…
Just a quick post to confirm that I have landed in my new post at the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. The National Forum office is located upstairs in the Royal Irish Academy building in the centre of Dublin. I live near Galway in the west of Ireland,…
Very brief announcement: I’m delighted to say that at the end of October I will be joining Ireland’s National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (@ForumTL) as a Strategic Education Developer. The National Forum works across all higher education institutions in Ireland with the mission of enhancing teaching and learning for all students. As…
I initially qualified and worked as an engineer, but for the past 25+ years I have worked as an educator — mostly in higher education, but also in different community contexts and in the tech industry. At ALT’s 25th annual conference next month, Frances Bell and I will facilitate a workshop titled: A personal, feminist…
Three months ago, I submitted and openly published my PhD thesis, Openness and praxis. The aim of the study was to understand whether, why, how, and to what extent individual educators used open educational practices (OEP) — with OEP defined as the creation, use and reuse of open educational resources (OER) as well as open…
I’ve another blog post brewing from all that’s transpired in the past month, particularly the #OER18 and #OEGlobal Conferences, but today I’m presenting at the Networked Learning Conference and want to capture a few links here. I’ll be sharing some of the results from my PhD research, but want also to foreground work that has…
Yesterday I formally submitted my thesis to NUI Galway. It is done! There are so many gateways and milestones in the doctoral process: each year’s progression (via Graduate Research Committee review), thesis submission for examination, the viva, completion of final corrections, printing and binding the final version, formal submission, and uploading the open access version.…