monthly roundup
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April 24 round up
I was looking forward to April, I had booked study leave and had a number of small, fun projects I wanted to get started. Well, it transpired that April had other plans. For no particular reason I had a mental health wobble in the first week, and was just getting over that when an elderly parent emergency arose, which necessitated several trips and stays in Bedfordshire. This included missing the much anticipated hockey playoff weekend in Nottingham with my daughter, and abandoning a holiday in West Wales. Add in an emergency dental appointment, and yes, April can do one. I looked back at my google doc for plans for this…
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March 24 round up
It’s been a busy presentation month. I gave a metaphors talk for Rikke Toft Nørgård’s Digital Pedagogy and Learning special interest group. I like these more informal presentations, and we had a fun chat about Nordic metaphors afterwards. I hosted a session for the European Digital Education Hub, on learning environments. Preparing for this prompted me to think more about AI enhanced learning environments, so it was one of those presentations that help move along your own thinking. Dominic Orr joined me and gave an excellent overview of the work they do at Atingi. I’ve blogged about the OER24 experience, so won’t say more here except to say it warmed…
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February 24 roundup
(photo shows Irwin DeVries, Audrey Watters, Brian Lamb and Rajiv Jhangiani in 2015) As February comes to an end, I feel I am entering the wind down phase of my Open University career, with departure scheduled for June. The replacement for my role on the Open Programme is being recruited, we’re planning for my last GO-GN workshop at OER24, and I’m handing over editorship of JIME. It leaves one in a slight liminal space mentally and work wise – I’m busy doing handover, and continuing workload, but I’m not required for planning things that will take place after I leave. It’s not so much that I have less work, but…
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January round up
Despite being 27 weeks into the year it is still only January apparently. I gave a keynote at an informative event organised by the Open University in Wales (pictured with my colleague John Butcher), to celebrate the launch of their Access Insight Project, looking at the experience of Access and Foundation students across Wales. It’s an excellent report, with HE and FE providers across Wales all collaborating effectively (not always the case in higher/further ed). I was asked to give a ‘provocative’ talk before lunch to get people chatting. Provocative can often be a synonym for ‘obnoxious’ but I hope I avoided that. I worked up the metaphor of the…
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December round up
I had an unexpected bounty of speaking invites for December, presenting about educational technology as an interdisciplinary topic for the Open Programme, an internal workshop on social media for researchers with my colleague Arosha Bandara and the keynote for the Social Media in Higher Education conference. These last two talks were interesting in that they made me reflect on how much has changed in the social media landscape over the past few years. Arosha and I gave a similar talk back in 2019, and this was a more cautious, nuanced one post pandemic and post-Musk Twitter. The talks prompted me to tidy up my social media presence a bit, and…
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October round up
Hosting a two day GO-GN workshop in Edmonton followed by the OEGlobal conference was the main activity of this month. This was the first conference post pandemic for many people, and it was good to reacquaint myself with many of the global contingent. It was also a tad wistful as it’s likely to be my last OEGlobal and possibly last international conference. So, I was potentially seeing a lot of people for the last time potentially. I got to go out on a social high note though with a trip to see the Edmonton Oilers play with these good people: While we’re talking about OER conferences, the OER24 call for…
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September round up
Well, this was an eventful month in this household. Maren stood down as CEO of ALT and is off to ventures new. If you’re interested in leadership coaching or consultancy on running virtual teams, then drop her a line. And then I announced that I’ll be leaving the Open University (although not until next June). All change here! I visited the ALT-C conference just for the dinner to see Maren get an award and have her send off. I did manage to attend one talk though, which was David Kernohan’s fascinating dive into the ALTC archive. He presented the various themes that had emerged and disappeared over the years in…
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August round up
Now that I no longer have a school-aged child that necessitates taking leave over summer, August has become one of my favourite work periods. The OU doesn’t operate conventional term times, so people take their leave whenever they wish, but summer is generally quieter, and the number of meetings drops away. What remains is something akin to what I always imagined being an academic would be like – working on writing, reading, developing interesting projects, walking the dog while pondering deep things. We had a face to face (!) GO-GN meeting over a couple of days this month, planning the next phase of the project. This included revisiting our social…
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July round-up
My “doing it for the newsletter” monthly round-up of activity and random bits for July. It’s been a bit of a disjointed month, because after returning from the Eden conference in Dublin at the end of June, both Maren and I came down with covid (no-one else from the conference seems to have been inflicted so probably an airport/plane thing). It was as rough as the first time around, a reminder that it’s still there and still carries a punch. I made sure to take time off work this time around though – last time I soldiered on attending Teams meetings and I think that meant it lingered around longer…
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June round-up
I usually send out my newsletter at the end of each month. It’s just a collection of the posts published that month (you should subscribe if for some reason you don’t check this site every day). I thought it would be nice maybe to start each newsletter with some personal introduction of what has taken place over the month, and hey, I may as well make that a blog post. So here are some highlights and thoughts from June. I went to the EDEN conference in Dublin, with Maren who was keynoting. Although I’ve been to a couple of conferences since lockdown, this was the first time meeting lots of…
