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…
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…
When we ask our students to share online — in a discussion forum within an LMS; in a wiki, course blog, Google Doc or Facebook group; on Twitter or anywhere on the open web — we are inviting not just online interaction but an enactment of each student’s digital identity. Involvement in or resistance to…
History has much to teach us about change. Time and again, social changes which begin with seemingly improbable goals bring about new realities, becoming the fabric of our lives. We each will have personal examples of this. From my childhood in New York City to my nearly 20 years living in the west of Ireland,…
The Volvo Ocean Race is in town! As I write this, the boats are due into Galway (the finishing point of the race) after midnight tonight. The last time “the Volvo” was in Galway in 2009, an estimated 10,000 people crowded into Galway city to greet the boats arriving — at 3:00 in the morning…
Some wonderful examples of Pecha Kucha presentations were a highlight of the recent Galway Symposium on Higher Education (#celt12) held at NUI Galway. If you’ve attended or delivered a Pecha Kucha presentation, you’ll know that it can be both a dynamic and challenging presentation format. Over the past two years I’ve had the opportunity to…
The 10th Galway Symposium on Higher Education will be held here at NUI Galway on June 7th and 8th. The theme is The Written Word: Writing, Publishing and Communication in Higher Education. The popular annual event, organised by CELT (Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching), attracts people from across higher education in Ireland and…
At the CESI (Computers in Education Society of Ireland) conference last weekend (#cesi12), I presented ‘Social networking with our students: digital identity, privacy and authenticity’. A number of people have asked for details of the articles and resources I referenced, so here are both the presentation and a summary of resources. Digital identity, privacy &…
“I don’t think education is about centralized instruction anymore; rather, it is the process [of] establishing oneself as a node in a broad network of distributed creativity.” – Joichi Ito As an educator involved in online learning I’ve noticed a change this year. I’ve had more conversations about online learning with colleagues who teach in…
Two groups of higher education students in Ireland — IT Professional Skills at NUI Galway and Emerging Technologies & Trends at LIT-Clonmel — are engaged in a collaborative project using Google+. We are now midway through the project. As described in my previous blog post, 2nd year students in IT Professional Skills (#ct231) develop research,…