Guests (2020/1)
Invited contributors to OKHE in Spring 2021
We are grateful to our contributors this year, who include graduates of OKHE, and invited experts from The University of Manchester and beyond.
Topic 1: Open practice
Louise Drumm
Louise’s background is theatre, starting with youth theatre, with its values of collaboration, empowerment and accessible artistic expression. Moving between disciplines and careers — artistic and technological — as a theatre director, software developer, learning technologist, academic developer and lecturer — her work is underscored by the belief that there is more that connect arts and digital education than separate them. In her work in higher education, as a learning technologist, researcher and lecturer, she connects people and ideas, whether it is introducing the political technique of forum theatre to conferences spaces, or inducting educators into playful spaces online where creativity and digital skills go hand in hand. Leading Edinburgh Napier University’s MSc in Blended and Online Education, open education, equity and critical digital pedagogies are at the heart of her educational approach. Her PhD, from Glasgow Caledonian University, was on the role of theory in teaching with technology in higher education. She is currently leading a university project supporting staff and student wellbeing, and online learning and teaching during the pandemic.
Website: louisedrumm.com | Twitter: @louisedrumm
Lianne Smith
Lianne Smith is an archivist in the Special Collections team at the University of Manchester Library. She has curatorial responsibility for archives, printed books and periodicals relating to the Christian Brethren and is Special Collections subject lead for Religions and Theology.
Lianne undertook an MA in Archives and Records Management at the University of Liverpool and since then has spent her career working in higher education special collections libraries, having spent a decade as Archives Services Manager at King’s College London before moving to the University of Manchester in 2019. She has always been an advocate of open practice, but taking OKHE in 2019/20, particularly in the context of her current role, challenged her understanding of the subject. She is especially interested in the importance of the personal dimension of open practice, and how scholarly perspectives and theories might help us understand this dimension, which she considered in her OKHE assignments.
Simon Abbott
Simon Abbott has worked in Professional Services roles within Higher Education since 2013, supporting the administration of undergraduate and postgraduate courses, most recently within the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester.
He balances his administrative work alongside a varied practice as a visual artist and creative, and over the last couple of years have been exploring and understanding creativity within the context of higher education.
Simon took OKHE in 2019/0, during which he wrote about the value of open approaches to workplace administration in Somewhere between paintings and process documents, and explored ideas of alternative online learning spaces in Building open learning communities.
Topic 2: Open teaching and learning
Professor April McMahon
April is Vice-President for Teaching, Learning and Students at The University of Manchester.
She was born in Edinburgh and grew up in the Scottish Borders. April was first in her family to go to university, and took her MA and PhD at Edinburgh — where she was very proud to be awarded an Honorary Doctorate in 2014. She has held positions at the Universities of Sheffield, Edinburgh, Aberystwyth and Kent, including Vice-Principal for Planning, Resources and Research Policy at Edinburgh, Vice-Chancellor of Aberystwyth University and Deputy Vice-Chancellor Education at The University of Kent.
April’s academic field is linguistics. Her research interests include how and why languages change; the use of computational methods to group languages into families; the evolution of language in humans; and the history of varieties of English and Scots. She has published 11 books and a wide range of articles and book chapters.
April is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and the Learned Society of Wales, and is a member of both the Audit Committee and the Research and Higher Education Policy Committee of the British Academy. She has a lively interest in training and development, especially relating to career development and leadership; she also chaired the Vitae Advisory Group for the Researcher Development Framework. With a strong commitment to enhancement of education and the student experience, she is Chair of the TEF Subject Pilot Humanities Panel and a member of the Subject Pilot Main Panel. She is an Honorary Fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge, and a member of the Board of Trustees of The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA).
Topic 3: Open research
Steve Carlton
Steve is a Research Services Librarian at The University of Manchester Library. In this role he has responsibility for managing the Green OA Service, Open Access+ and the Library’s support for persistent identifiers. If none of that means anything to you, he hopes to change that.
Steve has been working in open access for about six years now, and is particularly interested in the potential for open access to help remove barriers for non-academic audiences.
Steve has a BA in Librarianship from Manchester Metropolitan University, and is most of the way through an MA in Digital Library and Information Services at the University of Borås in Sweden. One day he’ll finally write his dissertation (about open access and non-academic audiences) and complete the course.
When Steve isn’t at work or avoiding academic writing, he enjoys watching wrestling, crisps, and listening to the music of Carly Rae Jepsen. You can find him tweeting about those things, plus open research and libraries, at @UoML_Steve.
