ICORE
I became a founding member of the International Council for Open Research and Education (ICORE). This follows many years of me engaging in open education and open learning activities and research.
Welcome!
On these pages you find information about my personal and professional background as well as some features about my interests in technology-enhanced learning, knowledge creation, knowledge transfer, and networked universities.
Learning technology has come a long way, and provides organisations, learners, and teachers with enormous opportunities to innovate not only their technical environment, but also the teaching and learning methodologies as well as their business processes. Most of all, the introduction of new media technologies leads to reflections about inherited traditional systems versus new approaches. My work contributes to these reflections and pursues not only innovation but also the effects that this innovation has on education, learning, and people.
This is a fast moving area and research focus changes quickly and often unexpectedly. My publications page contains a list of works in the field over the years. To a great extent they too reflect the changing nature of education.
My views on technology-enhanced learning
I am a passionate believer in the opportunities that technology has to offer to the knowledge society, both in terms of enhancement of learning and in reaching out to new learners. In remote and rural communities it is often the only way for people to access higher education. However, I am also of the opinion that technology alone does not produce new knowledge or learning and that new developments need to have a pedagogic and learner-centred approach.
Experience in commerce and education has shown that online solutions are at their best when built upon a traditional well-established structure. The pedagogic concept of Blended Learning is increasingly supported by universities and governments who realise that it provides a more sustainable approach than purely online offerings. This goes some way towards recognising that we cannot ignore pedagogic concepts that have been successful for decades before the internet arrived and still are.
Areas of interest
Technology enhanced learning has made giant leaps forward over the past few years. In my work, I try to keep up-to-date with latest developments and newest technologies. My current research interests focus especially on Learning and Knowledge Analytics, Language Technologies for learning support, Learning Networks, and Mobile Learning, but I also have a keen interest in other topics, including open education, game mechanics, or the most recent debate about connectivism.
Read more about my views on e-learning developments.
Home
Consultancy for Austria's adult education network
I have been charged with conducting a feasibility study for increasing the pedagogic potential of networked and web-based learning in the network of Austrian adult education colleges (Volkshochschulen). This is a challenging task as the 270 institutions are distributed across the country, serving many different educational needs. I look very much forward to finding suitable proposals for future development of these important adult education providers.
Open Networks for Culture and Education
A new online publication on Open Networks for Culture and Education (ONCE) from the ECLAP 2012 conference. The full proceedings including our article are available here.
JISC Project Advisor
I have been nominated Project Advisor to a forthcoming JISC project on "Portfolio Commons", a project that aims to develop an open source plugin for the Mahara portfolio system where users can select content from their portfolio and license it with a creative commons license of their choosing, create metadata and make a deposit directly into their chosen repository using the SWORD protocol.
IJTEL & JCAL reviewer
I have been invited to review papers for the International Journal in Technology Enhanced Learning (IJTEL) and the Journal for Computer-Assisted Learning (JCAL), both respected academic journals in the field.



