My love of language teaching is central to my identity and permeates all that I do both on and offline. I have been able to fully embrace my role as an academic language teacher in Higher Education through the process of applying to the HEA and being awarded a Senior Fellowship, for promotion internally where I am now a Principal Teaching Fellow, and becoming a founder fellow of the newly established Warwick International Higher Education Academy. A highlight of my professional development in language education was the invitation to deliver a keynote at the LLAS E-learning symposium in 2016 where I framed my life experience as a call to language professional to spend more time engaging in online spaces in order to bring their communicative expertise to their learners. 

Language education is often sidelined in the UK, hence the need for national mobilisation to defend the opportunities to access and prevent language education returning to limited availability in more exclusive teaching contexts. It is this perilous state of language learning which also drives my desire to practice as openly as possible. I continue to share my teaching materials as an open practitioner and found the suggestion for a guild based approach suggested by Terry Loane through the Open Education sig . The opportunity to work jointly on research around sustainability with colleagues at Monash University, Australia resulted in a publication as part of a special issue which will form the basis of a presentation I shall deliver at #OER17. 

I have also been able to work collaboratively to publish on the use of open badges to recognise skills acquisition through Online Intercultural Exchange in this volume building on the work I have done in the Clavier project reported in the original CMALT submission. I have also collaborated with others in HE on open badges, organising a conference at Southampton University. I have profiles on several open badge sites such as:

BadgeList ; Open Badge Passport ; Credly 

My experience of working on the European project Video for All provided a welcome platform to create open educational resources which could be used to train teachers and increase their understanding of the issues around digital media creation and use. The project provides cross referenced examples of teaching practice, each with suggestions for modification for different sectors and guidance for technical and pedagogical decisions. I recently facilitated an online workshop for the University of Limerick to disseminate this. 

Working in areas such as video has brought a sharp focus on copyright issues and their negative effect when looking to teach and learn languages. This is explored in this published paper on Produsage which I wrote collaboratively with a Monash colleague. Such scholarly work has helped me to develop a strong academic profile in technology enhanced language learning. 

I curate a wide range of video resources on an open gallery made available to us as part of our Kaltura provision, this has been a useful way to increase the visibility of teaching and learning resources such as tutorials and academic webinars. I play an active part in contributing to Warwick's teaching and learning community which is increasingly using technology to enhance learning.

Over the past few years my involvement in computer-mediated communication (CMC) has deepened and I have researched and published in this area as you can see on my Google Scholar profile. The area of CMC I am now involved in is Online Intercultural Exchange (OIE). 

I have delivered specialist input into several projects including: 

Coventry University's MexCo virtual exchange

European project Video for All

I have been able to use my expertise in order to curate resources for the field of CMC conducting webinars for the CMC SIG and sharing the research activities of others openly under Creative Commons licences for re-use. 

Open practice is important for languages as there is a low level of awareness of the research in effective use of language and communication, an area which has had significant attention in the language community and could contribute positively to other disciplines who are increasingly getting involved in international telecollaborative activity. I am delighted that the CALL community is allowing CMC researchers to reach out to form a cross disciplinary academic organisation, Unicollaboration.org to help share best practice and support the many opportunities this sort of activity can offer for social justice and intercultural understanding. 

I am actively involved in new developments in education which have resulted from the rise of digital technologies and have presented at Coventry University's Disruptive Media Learning Lab as a member of the West Midlands Region ALT group on how CMC disrupts borders. In the coming weeks I am working with Alastair Creelman @alacre in Sweden to provide a practitioner perspective in his ONL MOOC which helps interested practitioners get involved in open practice. Working at the leading (bleeding?) edge can be very challenging and I continue to be grateful for the support I have found in the ALT community where others face similar challenges. 

I have made considerable strides in my professional career which began in the 1980s. After 30 years in teaching I am delighted to have found an aspect of teaching practice which still holds plenty of challenge and interest for me, that of the successful implementation of technologies in learning and teaching. I am still enjoying contributing to this and have, thanks to the support network I have found through my PLN (personal learning network) a more confident, scholarly voice which I can bring to this area.

In future, even beyond retirement I intend to use it to: 

• insist on equity and principled decision making so that education remains a common good
• connect and collaborate with others wherever in the world they may be
• create OER and remain a lifelong learner

My most recent adventure is as a contributor to the wikimedia project and I am excited to see where that may lead.