Introduce yourself!

Hello!

I am one of the eLearning and Product Specialists at Catalyst IT Europe, with a key focus on Moodle and Mahara.

Prior to this I was a Learning Technologist at Cranfield Defence and Security, and Solent University before that.

I have been involved in many Mahara implementation projects and enjoy sharing my experiences with the global community. I recently created a OER called ePortfolios for Educators, and wrote an accompanying blog post for the ALT blog.

With my Catalyst hat on, I can offer consultancy and training to you and your colleagues and students ;)

Find me on Twitter: @samwisefox and on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samtayloruk/

I am most certainly the oldest participant in this conference, I used to be the German Mahara Granny introducing Mahara in Germany in a European project called MOSEP – More Self-Esteem with my E-Portfolio- E-portfolios as a method to prevent early school leaving and foster successful learning of students.

This was in 2008 and I had already been  in teacher training for Moodle for some time, always with the focus on the learners and how they could benefit from Moodle with their learning.  So this "Mahara call" came  just in time as I was not satisfied with the way learners could showcase their learning in moodle and I had started  to introduce blogging for them. But Mahara was the tool I had been waiting for to make learning more student centered and giving them more freedom - very difficult to sell to the teachers though - teachers being the absolute control freaks !

From the start the Mahara community was a very helpful community , at the time there were Penny Leach and Nigel McNie who were my direct troublesolvers on skype, you will see them in my presentation - and oh!!!! I needed them a lot as the first Mahara version was quite buggy and a challenge !!!

The rest of the story you can see in my keynote when I was invited to the 2015 MaharaHui in Southampton 

My very special thank goes to the wonderful, patient, effective , creative Kristina Hoeppner who has been a great community manager all these years since she took over from Penny! And she still finds time for her hobby, photographing . Keep up the good work Kristina!

So looking forward to tomorrow to sell all the other family members

Your Mahara Granny (turned 70 this year

Sigi

An educational use of technology to connect individuals , see: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_exchange

I am involved in two initiatives which aim to provide research into and normalise virtual exchange in Higher Education:

The EVOLVE project

UNICollaboration which is part of a European consortium to develop virtual exchange.