Development Team

Joe Wilson is a UK and international education consultant and the former Chief Executive of the College Development Network. His work mainly focuses on College and work-based education and its structures and practices. He is the former UK Ambassador for the Association of Learning Technology and currently Co-Chair of ALT in Scotland, a board member of Youth Link Scotland and Kelvin College Glasgow and has held a number of public appointments in Scotland over the last 20 years mainly in areas around adult and community education and learning technology. He was previously a school teacher, an adult education tutor, a college lecturer and a senior manager in a number of Scottish Colleges before working for a number of national agencies and non-departmental public bodies.

He has an ongoing interest in Open Education and was one of the co-developers of the Open Scotland Declaration. As Head of New Ventures at the Scottish Qualifications Authority, he secured a public statement of recognition in Scotland for Open Badges as a valid means to recognise achievement in formal and informal learning. Through his consultancy, he remains an active evangelist for open educational practice. He is currently engaged by City of Glasgow College.

MA(hons) , MBA , DipEd, PGCSE

www.joewilsons.net

https://twitter.com/joecar

Fiona Balloch is the Curriculum Head for Learning and Teaching in the Centre of Professional and Technical Education, at City of Glasgow College.

She runs a portfolio of online, hybrid and face-to-face courses. These include PDA Technology Enhanced Learning and Teaching, PDA Teaching Practice in Scotland’s Colleges and Digital Essentials for Teaching.

She has a variety of qualifications including Post Graduate Teaching Qualification Further Education, as well as MA Linguistics / Teaching English as a Second or Other Language and BA (Hons) Fine Art (First Class). In addition, she has digital skills certification in Microsoft Certified Application Specialist and Google Certified Educator levels 1 and 2.

Fiona has delivered training in technology and teaching methodology to clients including SportScotland, Northair, Catalyst and Crossroads.

She also has a range of international educator training experience in Kazakhstan, Brazil, Spain and China. In addition, Fiona delivered conference presentations and led educational marketing visit to Spain, Brazil, Italy and Turkey.

Her publications include the Teacher Development Resource Book, published by English Experience.

Lewis Ross is a Learning Technologist at City of Glasgow College.

He received a Bachelors of Engineering (B.Eng) in electronics engineer from the University of Glasgow. After this he was awarded a place on the Doctoral Training Centre (DTC) in Cell and Proteomic Technologies. The DTC was a collaboration between the University of Dundee, University of Edinburgh, University of Glasgow and University of Strathclyde. Through this program, Lewis was awarded a Masters of Research (MRes) in Proteomic Technologies. He then completed a PhD in Cell Engineering, his thesis title was “The development of an in vitro model of spinal cord injury using microfabrication”.

After gaining an interest in teaching during his PhD, Lewis went on to study for a Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) at UCL Institute of Education. As part of this program he gained qualified teacher status (QTS) in England and Wales. He then went on to work as a physics teacher.

After joining the team at City of Glasgow College, Lewis was one of the first people in further education in Scotland to complete the Creative Commons Certificate course. He has also completed several courses on G Suite administration and training.

John Casey is a Senior Learning Technologist at City of Glasgow College.

He started his academic career studying for a joint degree in Maths and Physics but changed direction and ended university with a degree in Irish and Russian literature. John’s working life has been equally varied. Having worked in the construction trade John retrained gaining vocational qualifications from City and Guilds in industrial electronics. This led him back into academia as a media technician designing and building multimedia computer labs for language and media studies, during this time John completed an MSc. in Education. His work on the ergonomics of room design was adopted by the Saltire Centre at Glasgow Caledonian University. While working at Stirling University in the early 2000’s John created ‘The Instructional Media Programme’ that was delivered to FE lecturers in Scotland. He was later invited to deliver the course to postgraduate student teachers at Cambridge University.

John is a published author in the field of technology and education, and has led and managed a number of R&D projects in this area. While working at Central St. Martins Art College in London, his analysis of economics trends in open education was referenced in a UK government report. John’s skills have also led him to occasional work in the music industry with diverse groups from Joe Strummer to the Shetland Music Archive. John maintains an occasional blog at: https://geronimoscadillac.com.

Dr Julian Hopkins is a Learning Technologist at City of Glasgow College. His longstanding interest in digital literacy and education has led him to believe that an effective learning experience is first and foremost best enabled through careful planning, providing challenging opportunities, communicating clear expectations and listening to each learner.

Information and communication technologies support this in different ways: developing blended learning using accessible online platforms; promoting student online peer interaction; using in-class feedback mechanism to enable active learning; providing constructive feedback in text, audio or video format; and, using appropriate software to support instructors’ and administrators’ workload.

He has 16 years teaching experience in further and higher education, and has a Graduate Certificate in Higher Education as well as a CELTA Certificate. He also has an active research role, and is Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at the School of Arts & Social Sciences, Monash University Malaysia. He has been researching the social and cultural implications of the internet and social media for almost twenty years, using a combination of ethnographic and sociological research methods, and has published internationally.

He recently published a book on the emergence of social media influencers, and occasionally blogs on his website.