Next?

My new post at the time of writing (November 2013) is as Course Director at Trinity College Dublin for their Masters in Technology and Learning. The course provides me with the best opportunity to make use of my background and, in designing and preparing learning experiences for the students, to improve my theoretical analyses in three ways: flesh out the detail; enhance coherence; and provide interpretation with respect to design decisions that educational developers must make.

At the same time, I hope to seek PhD supervision rôles that encourage development of these analyses including correction and extension. This may include seeking empirical evidence to strengthen what I claim is a valid designer's tool-set to have greater scientific reliability.

The other major direction forward is to develop the potential of the National Archive of Educational Computing to become a trusted and rich research resource. This includes continuing to design new software, but based on some of the ideas developed and forgotten over the last four decades which are stored in the archive. The comparison of a modern design with its updated pedagogical thinking against the original material will in itself clarify trends in education, but also provide a basis for critiquing both past and present. This strategy has the added value of providing a relevance, currency and forward direction to the archive which is easy to dismiss as simply backward looking.

In order to achieve this objective, I will need to make new alliances with disciplines I have so far not touched upon and learn about historical interpretation, artefact curation & preservation, cataloguing and knowledge engineering - a challenge I relish!