After five major eye surgeries for a detached retina I’ve written a new reflective blog post describing my experiences to date. I’ve illustrated my vision loss for each medical procedure and current condition to potentially help others going through similar medical journeys.

It’s been a hard year and to be honest and personal it’s been a mixed year of anxiety and pride. I think my early pandemic optimism (or naivety) has been eroded over time via 5pm briefings, attention grabbing headline, confusion, politicisation of everything and anything. On sunday 8th March 2020 I sat in a packed […]

I am always looking for opportunities to push myself as a developer so have been looking for opportunities to write more JavaScript. I’ve been dabbling in ReactJS and the static site generator GatsbyJS, but to date, I haven’t had much of an opportunity to do this in work.

People and

As LGBT History month draws to a close this month, I wanted to pay tribute to a collaboration brought about through Siobhan Claude at the University of Edinburgh’s Staff Pride Network and my colleague, Lorna Campbell, who suggested telling the history of HIV/AIDS activism and awareness in Scotland on Wikipedia. It seemed inconceivable that Wikipedia …

Reading Time: < 1 minute The first day of the Chinese New Year will be on Friday, 12th February, which is the Year of the Ox. To celebrate this festive occasion we decided to create a special colouring book illustration. Our first port of call was the University of Edinburgh’s Image Collection, where there are over 40,000 images published by the […]

Wikipedia is one of the most widely used means by which people get information, but it has lots of gaps and problems. Last semester, the residency collaborated with Professor Diana Paton and Lucy Parfitt at the University of Edinburgh History Society to begin a project to make it better. Participants were invited to improve public …

If you use Collaborate with your students or colleagues and you share your screen, sometimes they may be using a small screen and have problems seeing the details with what you are sharing.  It is possible for users to magnify what you are sharing – but it’s subtle and I …

Despite the fact that I’ve been using our learning and teaching services for years, I occasionally do discover something new about them that surprises me. I’ve had a couple of these moments recently, and I thought I’d share them because, well, it may be useful to someone who reads this.  …

Reading Time: 3 minutes Welcome back. I hope you are (reasonably) well (or maybe just surviving) in these difficult times. Regardless, thank you for tuning in on another blog post about the We Have Great Stuff – Volume 3 colouring book. It’s a new year and a new semester. But 2021 has not gotten off to the great start […]

I had a great time attending our virtual festive office party this week. A kind team of University colleagues designed a creative agenda, stuffed full of genuine LOL moments for us all. Inclusive event Traditionally we’d all have a wee quiz and fancy meal in an Edinburgh restaurant. For 2020, our virtual equivalent had some… Continue reading Virtual elf benefits