Coming soon to 2015

“Happy New Year!” by Chris Chabot. Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC
“Happy New Year!” by Chris Chabot. Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC

There are a lot of exciting things happening for me in 2015. January (with fingers, toes and eyes crossed) will see the publication of The Really Useful #EdTechBook, which I posted about earlier, and will feature my book chapter “‘…and what do you do?’: Can we explain the unexplainable?”. I had written another chapter for the #EdTechBook called “Educational Technology in the UK: Tracing our heritage” which didn’t make the finish cut as it didn’t quite fit the overall ethos of the book. I’m planning to redraft that chapter into an article for the Research in Learning Technology journal (thanks for the suggestion David) as I think that article would be a useful reminder, especially to those new to educational technology, as to where learning (or educational) technology in the United Kingdom (UK) originated from and why it has taken such a powerful hold in Higher Education (HE).

I have another book chapter on the horizon with the deliciously lurid title of “Confessions of an Online Distance Learning Junkie: From Personal Experience to Professional Practice” for a new book to be published shortly by Open University Press on enhancing learning and teaching in higher education. It is aimed at helping academic practitioners put Higher Education Academy (HEA) Fellowship applications together; it is neither a manual nor a textbook. The book will speak more towards the contested nature of HE, giving the reader things to think about rather than telling them what to think. Furthermore, the book will have contributions from both students as well as academics.

March 2015 will see the completion of the seventh and final taught module of the Doctorate in Education (EdD) and then the clock starts ticking on the thesis stage of the EdD. This, of course, is dependent upon my research proposal being accepted and for my ethics application to be given the green light. My EdD research will explore ways in which the ‘whole’ academic in higher education invest themselves through professional learning and the conditions in which this takes place. I am framing this research within a sociomaterial perspective. I will be using this blog and other social media channels to develop an autoethnographic account of my own professional learning activity, which will critically situate me as a “technologist-researcher” (Barry, 2014) with the participants and the organisation within a social, political, economic and cultural context (Spry, 2001:710), thus I “become part of the inquiry” (Patton, 2002:116) given that I am already inducted in a culture that provides educational professional development (EPD) for academic staff.

So watch this space…

References

Barry, W. (2014). The Learning Technologist’s Tale: A Liminal and Intellectual Pilgrimage. Assignment submitted for the Doctorate in Education. Canterbury, England: Canterbury Christ Church University.

Patton, M.Q. (2002). Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methods. 3rd Edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Spry, T. (2001). “Performing autoethnography: An embodied methodological praxis”. Qualitative Inquiry, 7(6), pp. 706-732. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/107780040100700605 [Accessed 28.11.2014].