At last week’s Open Education Conference (OER22), I shared an update on my GO-GN Fellowship project Just Knowledge. ‘Just Knowledge’ is a community-focused open knowledge research project guided by three core ideals: justice, equity and openness. Four community initiatives in the west of Ireland are participating in the project. I invited feedback following a…
This blog post is an initial contribution to a workshop I’ll be co-presenting at OER22 (26-28 April): ‘Applying the Capability Approach to Open Educational Practice’ with Gabi Witthaus. The workshop arises from our recent discussions about overlaps in our work and our visions for open education. Next week, Gabi and I will publish a joint…
In November 2019, I began a 3-year post as Strategic Education Developer at the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. My role has been to work as National Forum lead in the area of digital and open education, spanning policy and practice, working in collaboration with students and staff…
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…
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…
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.…
Today and tomorrow I’ll be working with a group of academic staff here at NUI Galway as part of the Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education here in CELT. Of course it’s very dangerous to ask someone who’s *just* completed their PhD in open education to talk about… open education 😉 So, I’ve…
Over the past six years, I’ve created several Storify stories (some published, some drafts), usually summarising events, group activities, or conversations that I didn’t want to lose in endlessly streaming social media feeds. (Before that I used Storyful to create stories, but they stopped their story curation app in or around 2012.) I was never…
I’m in the final few weeks of my PhD — the thesis-writing part of the process, anyway. My research topic is open educational practices (OEP), specifically how educators and students make sense of and make use of OEP in higher education. So, yes, I’ve been thinking a lot about that. But I’ve been reflecting also on…
I’m a lover of a variety of podcasts — education, science, politics, arts & culture. I listen to learn, to laugh, to be moved (and, honestly, often to be transported elsewhere as I inch through another of Galway’s traffic jams). A wonderful find of the past year has been Teaching in Higher Ed by Bonni Stachowiak. A recent episode with…