Earlier this month, I took over as SICSA Director of Education from Dr Rachel Menzies, who has served in this capacity over the last two years. First off, I would like to thank Rachel for all her hard work, and I look forward to serving the community in this role.
I am curren
tly a Senior Lecturer and Course Leader at the Robert Gordon University, with a passion for computing education – more specifically, student transition into higher education and the concerns that our students start their journeys with. I have had continuous engagement with SICSA through a number of events over the past few years and have been supported throughout my career by a number of SICSA Education workshop funds, in topics ranging from entrepreneurship to peer assessment. Through these events, the last Education All-Hands, and various other conferences, I have had the pleasure to meet and work with many of you – and during my tenure as Director of Education, I hope I can rely on your knowledge and enthusiasm to support the fantastic ongoing work in this area that is going on all over the country.
We do a lot of great work in this field; largely being shared at international conferences, and I think we can do more, internally, to support this body of work moving forward. I would like for us to increase the visibility of our fantastic Education work, and to be able to engage in discussion across the year, not just during set meeting points. To this end, I will shortly be circulating a call for each institution to nominate an Education Champion.
On this note – I would like everyone to encourage colleagues, especially new lecturers interested in the field to join – and share content – to the SICSA Education mailing list, which you can sign up to here: http://lists.inf.ed.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/sicsa-education.
Finally – if you have any ideas of things that can be done to build the education community, then get in touch. I am keen to engage not only with academics, but also PhD students, school teachers and industry – there are many stakeholders with a vested interest in Computing Education, and I am very excited to be working with all of you.