A farmer from China once spent 16 years teaching himself law in order to sue a big chemical firm for polluting his land. He used a dictionary to help him understand legal jargon. In an ideal world, education would be accessible to people from all walks of life regardless of where they’re from, the language they speak, or their current level […]
We held our first Learning Technology Community meeting this week; a new group but a very well-established idea. Fifty-eight colleagues, who identify their work in some way as relating to learning technology, attended to hear presentations from Karen Howie, James Bradshaw, Sharon Boyd, and Alex Burford, on their work and experience relating to preparing for […]
At the UCD Gathering conference last week, Laura Yarrow’s talk on rebellious creativity was a definite highlight for me. She talked about what we can learn from children’s rule-ignoring, rebellion-embracing ways to improve our ideas, creativity and ways of working. A story about her 5-year-old son summed it up well. When frantically searching for an […]
I’m building a boat. A wooden boat, in a traditional hand-crafted way, I’m a student on a course on boat building, to build an Arendalspram, which is a traditional small Norwegian wooden rowboat, popular along the Skagerrak (love the sound of this word, its sounds so Viking, its the sea between Norway and Denmark) coast, […]
During a year where we’ve seen a switch to a new way of working, I attended the User Centred Design (UCD) online conference, covering all aspects of user-centred design and looking at research from various speakers and industries around the world. User experience and design is somewhat integrated within my role and I was looking […]
In his talk at the UCD Gathering event last week, Spencer Turner summed up the universal complaints he’s heard repeatedly throughout his career about meetings and workshops. I think we’re probably all familiar with problems like focus getting lost and conversations wandering off topic, calendars full of mysterious meetings we’re not sure why we’ve been […]
This year for Ada Lovelace day, I wrote a new Wikipedia page about Dr Isabel Gal, a Hungarian paediatrician and Holocaust Survivor who, in 1967, was responsible for establishing a link between use of the hormonal pregnancy test Primodos and severe congenital birth defects. I came across Gal quite by chance via the @OnThisDayShe twitter […]
Earlier in September, my colleague Neil McCormick, Education Technology Policy Officer at LTW, and I took part in Jane Secker […]
This is a belated transcript of the talk I gave at the ALT Summer Summit 2020. Slides from this presentation are available here: For the Common Good – Responding to the global pandemic with OER. At the height of the global COVID-19 pandemic, UNESCO estimated that 1.57 billion learners in 191 countries worldwide had had […]
So, day 1 back in the office (not the office), after a 9-week paternity leave which coincided with a sudden decision as a family to move countries. We are getting settled now in Risor – Trehusbyen (The town of wooden houses) Norway. Everyone seems to be settling faster than me, I have been asked by […]
