Hello!

My name is Rebecca Ferriday, I'm a full time Digital Education Specialist at a UK-based university, a card-carrying nerd of over 50 years standing, and a VERY mature PhD student. 

My career in education began in 1997, when I volunteered as an adult skills tutor teaching basic literacy, numeracy, and IT skills in an adult education centre in Cornwall. I transitioned to a (salaried!)  teacher educator role in my local Further Education college, gaining my PGCE and a Masters in Education along the way. 

I was excited by the ever-changing world of all things digital, I moved from teacher to learning technology, from further to higher education, and from Cornwall to Wales, where I have been working happily ever since. I show academics how to use digital tools to enhance their teaching and students;' learning, using pedagogy as the driver rather than the tool itself. I'm also a big proponent of using virtual worlds as digital teaching spaces, and adding elements of gamification to teaching and assessment practices to make for a more enjoyable student experience.

More importantly (to me, anyway!), I'm a lifelong fan of video games, particularly Role Playing Games (RPGs), and have spent hundreds of hours playing dozens of these on consoles from the Sega MegaDrive to the XBox X, with side quests leading me to to the PlayStation 1, 2, 4 and 5 along the way. Having experienced some 'happy accidents' while playing games, my interests in gaming and education have now combined to form the basis for my PhD research around the impact unintended consequences of playing open world Role Playing Games have on Higher Education students. 

If you're looking for an academic, well-referenced and all together grown-up website, then I must warn you that you have come to the wrong place. This site sets out to be a repository of content I've generated that may be rewritten and reframed as 'bits' of my thesis. It's also an infodump for other emerging grounded theory researchers who may or may not be interested in video gaming as part of education. Eventually, I hope this becomes a space to record some outputs, as well as a repository of resources that may be of use to practitioners, students, and gamers alike. 

It's very much a work in progress, quite informal and 'bloggy' in design, and liable to change at a moment's notice, so bear with me!