Any minute now, These nights won’t end in sweats And my pillow will welcome And not my witness my end.
Any minute now, These dreams of youth, The inspiration of friends, The diety of transit, of Montreal, of Pittsburgh, of Seoul, Will rest patiently for a few years, if not ever.
I rolled dice that were not my own. I borrowed time in Foreign lands. I soaked in the soil of incomprehension, of that beauty of the impossible, Of that possibility that it might never end.
I was Peter Pan, green to the marrow.
Times with friends are not unique but they are mine so they are exquisite. They are not art but artifice, not subtle but sublime. They are the stuff of nonsensical everyday piously humble legend.
They are the roots of trees that will not grow Aside from in imaginative enterprises.
They grow in perversely illogical waters, far from shore, far from the Singapores and Moscows. that I will never visit. Far from rounding the Cape, I burrow in the bay, sinking deep but imagining limitless horizons, endless waters, journeys without ends.
I imagine death, but as a beginning, a beginning without end.
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.
