About

I have almost twenty years experience working in education technology and interoperability standards, with a specific focus on open education.  I currently work for the OER Service within the Learning, Teaching and Web Services Division at the University of Edinburgh.  I am also a Board member of the Association for Learning Technology and Wikimedia UK, and Member of Council of the Society for Nautical Research. For many years I worked as Assistant Director of the Centre for Education Technology, Interoperability and Standards (CETIS), and in 2015 became a founding partner of CETIS LLP.

My main areas of expertise include digital infrastructure for open educational resources, open education policy, open licences, technologies for supporting the management and distribution of educational content and multimedia, metadata, vocabularies, and digital repositories. I’m an experienced project manager and in the past I have been responsible for coordinating and delivering technical support for a wide range of national and international development programmes and projects including the UKOER Programme and the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative.

My current areas of interest and activity include institutional strategies for supporting open education and OER, open education policy for Scotland and new subject coding schemes for UK higher education.  I lead the Open Scotland initiative, and I am a member of the Advisory Group of the Open Knowledge Open Education Working Group. Together with Melissa Highton I co-chaired the OER16 Open Culture Conference at the University of Edinburgh.

I regularly speak at academic conferences and workshops and often get “volunteered” to chair and facilitate events.  I’m an active and enthusiastic user of social media and I maintain a number of blogs, including Open World which I use to connect with the community and disseminate education technology news and innovation.  I often live tweet conferences and events including the ALT Annual Conference. I also write and publish through more traditional channels including policy documents, briefing papers, synthesis reports, peer reviewed journal papers and book chapters.

I’ve  represented  UK F/HE on a number of standards bodies including the British Standards Institute, IMS Global, CEN / ISSS Learning Technologies Workshop and the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.

I have an academic background in Archaeology, a domain I worked in for a number of years. I have an interest in naval history and in 2016 published a  book on the lives and careers of the 1797 crew of HMS Indefatigable. I am Chair of the Society for Nautical Research Publications Committee, an active twitterstorian and, when time allows, I contribute to academic history conferences and seminar series.