Jen looks so inviting in this picture, I couldn’t help but follow her.
She had gone ahead as I had gotten lost in the bookstore, thumbing through postcards of Yeats and feeling inspired, tumbling clumsy verse in my head, while she had trailed off and to have a coffee.
And I joined her here, and we sat for awhile. I never had a happier moment in all our trip.
The sparse walls, the bookish atmosphere, living in the ghosts of Joyce, this being the National Library, this calm heart, this odd feeling of content, this invitation, as seen through my eyes.
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.