A look back at 2025

It's been a busy 2025. I keep pinching myself . I am so lucky to have escaped the trenches of 9-5 and I am so enjoying the move back to interesting consultancy work. I did a bit of a reflective piece at one year out mark.

Mindful too that my freedom gives me scope and responsibility to flag up many of the challenges still facing great colleagues in Scottish College landscape - still under siege. There are a few more folks who have escaped and know exactly what is happening would be great to see them chipping in to discussions too rather than simply watching the sector being stifled.

I started 2025 with a post about sectoral challenges - I think things have got worse over the past year. I also framed my resolutions for year - which mostly I've achieved.

Quite a year. Started 2025 in a new TQER role at QAA and it's been busy since ,#bett25 , supporting open badges ( new book chapter about to arrive ) - keynoting at #oer25, visiting schools across Calgary and Edmonton for the #ScotlandEducationSummit, and co-chairing #ALTC25 in Glasgow and hosting many international visitors and supporting Royal Society of Arts in Glasgow.

Some highlights that mattered:

The #oer25 keynote was a real privilege - had a great day exploring the intersection of Open Education and AI. Open education is so much more than free resources - it's about systems, approaches, and making practice sustainable. Slides with extras here: https://lnkd.in/eASCiSqp

The week in Canada with SMART Technologies was amazing - super to spend time with innovative Scottish education colleagues visiting schools and building connections between our systems. Report here: https://lnkd.in/emiwjpCW

Refreshingly joined up - Edinburgh University's openly licensed AI advice for Scottish teachers, co-created with multiple national agencies. This is what good collaboration looks like: https://lnkd.in/eMNcYgCY

Co-chairing #ALTC25 in October was a real pleasure - fantastic to have the learning technology clans gathering in Glasgow for the first time: https://lnkd.in/eYNTsP9d and a privilege to launch #AmplifyFE impact report https://lnkd.in/ePuBWn86

Supported RSA in Glasgow helping with both a Civic Reception at Glasgow City
Chambers and a fun event at newly refurbished Citizens Theatre.

Found time for some great travel adventures to Morocco, Italy, France and Jordan.

Enjoying popping in and out of London to see our daughter too and we had a great family wedding in Leeds. 

What struck me across 2025: we're adopting AI faster than we're adopting open licences. Still a long journey in Scotland to achieve a place where Open Educational Practice is standard. But there's momentum - and the new Scottish Govt Digital Strategy gives room for optimism.

Grateful to everyone who engaged in conversations this year - at conferences, online, and over coffee in Glasgow. Love to all !

Looking forward to continuing the push in 2026. If your institution is experimenting with open badges or local LLMs I'd love to hear about it.

I'll be around #Bett26 and heading down for a pre conference session with 1EdTech - If you are in London let me know and we can catch up.

This year I am looking forward to joining in 20th anniversary celebration of #Teachmeet #Teachmeet26 on the Thursday evening. You can sign up and run a session here https://lnkd.in/e6YRAiM5

If you are Scottish based and not coming down for #Bett check out City of Glasgow College's Learning and Teaching Conference - open to all https://lnkd.in/e-W3ArfT . Great to see a former Cardonald College student keynoting.

As always you can follow my journey on my blog https://lnkd.in/eDP_bMsu
I've some more big news to come.

Next a post on what I'm looking forward too in 2026

#openscot #OpenEducation #OER #AIinEducation #ALTC25 

Year in Review 2023

A quick year in review - next post will be looking forward.

I managed to fit in a lot of personal and business travel in this year.  Thanks in the main to external organisations who are interested in what we are getting up to at City of Glasgow College. From Cupboard to Keynote - our work around AI has been picked up on a number of fronts. 

That combined with some of my friends' big birthdays and some major sporting events. It's  been quite a year.  Tinged with sadness as I lost one of my big cousins and just before Christmas my 88 year old uncle. 

Had lots' of nice nights out with old pals down the pub , combined with St Mirren and Scotland having great football seasons and caught a number of great gigs including Pulp. 

Venice was great fun for the Carnivali in February, Barcelona was great en famille as was short return to Ile De Re at the start of the summer. 

Our big escape was a tour of France for the Rugby World Cup. Which was just superb - Rheims, Lyons. Bandol , Marseille , Villefranche , Nice and repeat on homeward leg, just great. 

Made even better that our family came out for different legs of the tour and we had a lot of old rugby chums to meet up with along the way. 

That combined with speaking in London (BETT) , Amsterdam (Edutech) , Liverpool (Instructure/Canvas) and Inverness  (#OER23) among other places made for a busy year. 

Reflections on a Busy Year – Part Two

There is never enough time or money to support ground up initiatives. There is a lot of ground level work out there that could and can transform the lot of learners.  I think there are more of these than ever this year – and well done all ...

If you get a moment you should check out some of these links to teachers taking control of their own CPD.  I am always amazed that some more of the teacher training institutions are nor more visible in the CPD space in this way.

http://purposed.org.uk  useful discussion on purpose of education across UK

http://edutalk.cc/   nice set of educational podcasts

Pedagoo http://www.pedagoo.org/   teachers for teachers on a host of topics from Scottish Teachers 

Scotedublogs  http://www.scotedublogs.org.uk/   Still for me best aggregation of Scottish Educational Blogs

Teachmeets  just grows and grows and driven by teachers   http://teachmeet.pbworks.com/w/page/19975349/FrontPage

Most of the really good Scottish educational bloggers are now on twitter and you probably get richest diet from them here. But a few old timers worth following who will quickly lead you into the community of Scottish Educational Bloggers and Twitterers

https://twitter.com/@nwinton

https://twitter.com/@olliebray

https://twitter.com/@literacyadviser

https://twitter.com/@islayian

https://twitter.com/@camaxwell

https://twitter.com/@cpdScotsman

https://twitter.com/@johnjohnston

Sorry I  can’t list everyone but check out Scottish Education Twits for feeds from main Scottish Educational Twitterers.

Worth following too those who stride around the world stirring things up

http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/

http://www.johnconnell.co.uk/blog/

But best of all I found some new folks with new ideas emerging

http://unplugd.trailsoptional.com/  Olivia Wexelstein  https://twitter.com/owexelstein

Reflections on a Busy Year - Part One

Tidying out my  inbox and calendar, and while I get the chance, reflecting on a year measured out by appointments almost on each hour.  I think what still frustrates me is that I can’t put down all the things we get up to here, mainly because of the sensitivities around competition which is still an alien concept to many in Scottish education – not in the competition of ideas which should drive learning and is familiar ground, but that in education the profit motive can get in the way of excellence.

The thought that there are global corporates who will read this and frustrate us where they can, horrifies me but it is the reality of education and learning as a global service.  We need to be open to the best ideas and the most cost effective ways of delivering services to learners, competition is a good thing,  but we need to be wary of those whose mission is simply to set toll gates around learning with the aim of “monetising education” while still continuing to build public private partnerships with those who have higher ideals and are willing to work for and with us to support learners in Scotland.

Last year was dominated by the forces of change one way or another in all areas of my work.

Huge changes in institutions in Scotland

• Education Scotland arriving, on the one hand meant lots of leaving parties, but meant too that change and handovers dominated the agenda of many meetings over the year.
• Glow metamorphosing into what?.. we’ll find out early in New Year
• JORUM changing direction and management structures,
• November and December lots of meetings around future shape of further education in Scotland and Glasgow,  as a Board Member at Anniesland College. The impact of restructuring  on the further education sector will become apparent to many in the coming year.
• One major scheduled change; Curriculum for Excellence and the roll new national qualifications,  this is doing well against a background of change and sticking to its delivery timeline

Internally I spent almost a year cajoling and encouraging some policy changes to make it an easier option to take vendor SCQF credit and leveled awards into national awards where institutions and qualification development teams need this.  This was behind the scenes work to support the DIVA project where we welcomed Linux at the start of year and VMWare at end of year.  Still patchy communication and information flow between centres and vendors and not enough made of opportunities that come from many of them.   Did my bit too to help SQA finally get a social software policy in place and hope it makes a difference in coming year.

On DIVA we hope to do more around communications early in New Year.  It was great to see a strong Scottish presence over in Washington for Partners in Learning Conference but I still fear many of these opportunities pass too many by in the main as folks are not aware of all the development opportunities available to them.

Finally an active year for Cross Party Skills Committee transitioning with new administration, on-going work getting things in place for Scotland’s Commonwealth Games 2014 through the Legacy Committee and lots of fine tuning of offers through the Partnership Action for Continuing Employment and at end of year lots of work with Scotland’s Colleges, Skills Development Scotland and Education Scotland looking once again at a shared services agenda.

I was fortunate too to get along to ALT-C11  and OER11 this year 

Happy New Year

I did a bit of a spring clean around this blog including moving over to a new template. One day I'll spend some more time and set up a wordpress account . In the meantime I probably need to do a bit more hacking around with this blogger template to get the utility I'd like from it but it is starting to get there.

When I returned to blogging in 2006 I thought I'd probably blog about once a week - the reality is that with the arrival of twitter my posting rate is well down on this.

• ►  2010 (31)

• ►  2009 (68)

• ►  2008 (80)

• ►  2007 (31)

• ►  2006 (1)

Hit rates are down too on previous years. The posts that attracted most traffic are mostly all from the end of year 

• A summary of Scottish Government Technolgies for Learning Discussion
• An account of Donald Clark's excellent presentation at the ALT-C Conference
• A posting on Open Educational Resources 

Should add my favorite post of the year ..first post last January tracking our amazing adventures in the Phillippines  http://www.joewilsons.net/2010/01/happy-new-year.html

• 
  

Happy New Year

Shared with Flock - The Social Web Browser
http://flock.com

I haven't blog posted since early December - but what an amazing time I have had in between.
A holiday of a lifetime with our family in the Philippines -6 islands, an ascent of a live volcano, amazing city life, wonderful beaches to canoe and snorkel off , all the Christmas and New Year Celebrations with a local twist and the food - fantastic everywhere - including a feast at the home of the national celebrity chef Claude Tayag.



We can't thank the Lazatin, Tayag and Fernandez famillies enough for sharing a very unique Philippino experience with us.

Then a return to a snowy cold Glasgow some frantic sledging with friends , two days in office to try and catch up with all that happening in Scotland and then a week in London at the excellent Learning and Technology World Forum and my annual round of meetings at BETT10.
Lots to report and the year has just started.