I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but I left the Open University this month. I had a lovely leaving party with colleagues (funded by ourselves I hasten to add). Maren and I marked the end of that era with a holiday in Sardinia. Since I’ve returned I’ve blogged some thoughts about the OU, and am now busy setting other activities in motion. I have joined the board of Trustees for the National Extension College and have my first board meeting next week. It’s largely been a period of establishing a new working environment. I handed back my university Macbook and bought myself a nice shiny iMac. I’ve been setting…

(I’ve been going through some old photos – I’m the little blond one in the above, where it appears that I grew up in the 1930s) I’ve been having a “Month of Lasts” as my OU clock ticks down: Last Open Programme meeting, last JIME meeting, last Applaud Steering committee, last research theme meeting. Shedding all those roles and activities one accumulates like burrs on a poodle running through a field of burdock feels liberating. I’m not quite sure what will replace the interaction, structure and activity that meetings provide though. We do of course like to portray the meeting as the irritating guest at our work wedding, but across…

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…

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…

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…