There was no transition to these autumnal shadows, this darkness. I boarded a plane on the Mediterranean and cast my lot with the familiarity of youth, endless waning fall days spent staring from the cracked window of my bedroom on Clearmount.
I remember this listlessness and am perversely comforted by it. Winter stretches out ahead, dreams dither, action is neither conclusive nor decisive. Scripts stretch over reams and not sheets.
It is time for introspection, for recollection, for retribution. It is a winter of contentedness, a flicker of self-importance.
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.