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 đ  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…
Many thanks to Maha Bali for organising tonight’s Open Pedagogy Hangout. Maha has curated a number of blog posts about open pedagogy and also started a Google doc to collect notes, links, etc: http://bit.ly/CurateOpenPed. Thanks to all who have blogged and shared their thoughts. I’m grateful for the opportunity to participate and looking forward to…
At last! Thanks to modeling* and encouragement from so many of you, a friendly nudge from Jim Groom in Galway last week, and support from all the lovely folks at Reclaim Hosting, I have A Domain of My Own: http://catherinecronin.net. Welcome to my new home… more to come đ * American English spelling, with apologies…
Post-#OEGlobal and pre-#OER17, my mind is on fire. At the end of Open Education Week and Brexit week; working on another draft chapter for my PhD, yet pulled in the direction of events in Ireland, the US, Mosul, Venezuela and more, my mind is on fire. I have many posts to write but I shall write one, in gratitude.…