Academic Process Concept, by Jen Gallagher

I am working on a few different projects exploring some neglected aspects (I think) of academic process and elearning design, beginning with this one. Other projects include the role of sound as an organizing agent in elearning, mlearning design, open courses, along with my impending doctoral research. Another project I am exploring is the structure of knowledge created from social, mostly open learning spaces. Knowledge that can, but doesn’t need to, resemble traditional scholarly output, monographs and articles. So, I wanted to re-engineer bits of these outputs to reflect the underlying foundation of scholarly interaction that informs the output.

So, like everyone else, I rely on metaphor and analogy. Without divulging too much detail (as I don’t have any yet), I likened this process and structure architecturally. Not original by any stretch of the imagination and I am still debating if it is even an apt metaphor at all (architecture implies rigidity of structure?). So, I commissioned a few drawings from my architect sister to round out my analysis and give this re-engineering a conceptual hook. I thought the drawings were beautiful enough to share here. Apologies for not sharing the entire project, but it is still in a very conceptual mode.

Please note that all images are from Jen Gallagher, and the Creative Commons license can be found  by clicking on the image itself.

Stage I: Congregation, commons, shared space, reflective private space

Academic Process Concept, by Jen Gallagher

Stage II: Panning out, growth, emerging structure. Derivative and novel congregation.

Academic Process Concept, by Jen Gallagher

  Stage III: Derivative output, buttressed.

Academic Process Concept, by Jen Gallagher

By Michael Gallagher

My name is Michael Sean Gallagher. I am a Lecturer in Digital Education at the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh. I am Co-Founder and Director of Panoply Digital, a consultancy dedicated to ICT and mobile for development (M4D); we have worked with USAID, GSMA, UN Habitat, Cambridge University and more on education and development projects. I was a researcher on the Near Futures Teaching project, a project that explores how teaching at The University of Edinburgh unfold over the coming decades, as technology, social trends, patterns of mobility, new methods and new media continue to shift what it means to be at university. Previously, I was the Research Associate on the NERC, ESRC, and AHRC Global Challenges Research Fund sponsored GCRF Research for Emergency Aftershock Forecasting (REAR) project. I was an Assistant Professor at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (한국외국어대학교) in Seoul, Korea. I have also completed a doctorate at University College London (formerly the independent Institute of Education, University of London) on mobile learning in the humanities in Korea.

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