A trite signature on an email the other day cautioned against maintaining a house full of clutter, mandating that I remove anything that wasn’t useful or beautiful.
If I were to heed this worldly sage I know that you would not be pleased for I would remove the glasses (including those remaining Spiegalaus I haven’t broken) and you would have to drink from the faucet or the carton.
I would heave our laptops from our window and reluctantly whisper a wish that they didn’t strike the dog of Mr. Late Night Phone Talker downstairs.
You would have nary a chopstick to poke at food, nor a small spoon to slurp your soup. There would be no chair to sit, no bed to sleep, no closet to hang your assortment of Adidas running clothes, nor thousands of futuristic jogging shoes for that matter.
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.
