I suppose it would be a good idea to write a little about what this whole blog is meant to be, and it might be a good idea to share a little about myself while I am at it.
My name is Ken and this is my blog. It is mostly a personal playground where I can share, thoughts, music, photos and anything else that crosses my mind. It is my little corner of the Internet and the only purpose it serves is to keep me busy, keep me occupied, and keep me distracted. I guess it is like my digital garden, I’m not much of a gardener in real life so this will have to do instead. I do go between spells of doing a lot of digital gardening and letting it get a bit overgrown!
I was born in 1969, so my formative years were the 1980’s. That decade shaped me for better or worse and it has heavily influenced my musical tastes and it was also the decade that I first got an introduction to technology. It started with a ZX81 and ended with an Amstrad PC1640, a few short years later in the 90’s I got my first taste of online life with Compuserve. Musically the 80s started with Madness and the Ska revival, in the mid part of the decade I was a huge Frankie Goes To Hollywood fan and for all of the second part of the 80’s I worked as a DJ.
I am a husband and a father, a son and a brother and sadly in 2021, I became a widower when my beautiful late wife Clodagh succumbed to a particularly aggressive cancer. I have three grown-up children who miss her as much I do and they do like to remind me exactly how old I am. I have two sisters and twice as many brothers. I am the second youngest and have often joked that the first four years of my life (when I was the youngest) were my best ones and that it has been all downhill since then. I have lived most of my life in Fermoy, Co. Cork but as neither of my parents was from Fermoy I have lots of relations all over. My mother was originally from Dublin and my father was from Milford in Co. Cork, both have sadly passed since I first wrote these words and are deeply missed.
I am currently living and working in Waterford City. It is my third time living here after two previous spells in 1990 and again in 1997. All three of my children were born in Waterford. Professionally, I have worked for myself, I have worked in the family business (now sadly closed), and I have worked for others in enterprises of all shapes and sizes. I have worked in sales, management, and IT/Web development for all of my career to date. I am always thinking about new business opportunities and ideas.
I grew up working in the family motor and hotel businesses in Fermoy and have also spent time working with Motorola, Thomas Crosbie Holdings and currently with South East Technological University (formerly Waterford Institute of Technology) where I started helping people avail of the Springboard opportunities to return to education, worked in the Centre for Technology Enhanced Learning as Head of Technology-Enhanced Learning (Acting) and more recently as the institute lead for N-TUTORR a national project that aims to transform learning in the technological higher education sector. I am a lifelong learner and I completed a Higher Diploma in Management in 2013, an MSc in Management of Internet Enterprise Systems with DCU in 2014, and a Postgraduate Diploma in Innovation through Design Thinking with UCC in 2022.
I am an avid user of MOOCs and online learning and have completed over a dozen to date on various platforms including Coursera, EdX, FutureLearn and iVersity. Technology and education and the interplay of the two are the things that I get excited about and I look forward to seeing the future unfold.
During the Covid pandemic, I started a podcast called Who’s Zoomin’ Who? where I get to talk to interesting people about education and technology. More recently I have completed my certification for LEGO® Serious Play® and have probably allowed my LEGO obsession to get slightly out of hand. I have helped a number of companies and organisations with LEGO® Serious Play® sessions more details of which can be found on my other website lsp-xp.ie.