I am Sue Owen. I am a self-employed education researcher and resource designer based in North Wales. I have a degree in pharmacy and worked in the pharmaceutical industry for eight years. But since 1991 I have been a teacher of adults and a researcher into education. My most recent teaching experience was at City of Bristol College, where I have spent four years teaching numeracy, ICT and vocational subjects. I used to use this website as a showcase for the websites which I produced in the course of my job as a researcher in education at Bangor University, but they were all products of their time and none are online any more. So this is now more of a description of the main items of my ICT CV.

What strikes me in looking back is that the topics I was researching ten years ago have taken a long time to catch on. From 1994 onwards the team at Bangor University, which I joined in 1997, were investigating online collaboration and resource sharing. It's great that this is taking off in some areas, but teachers, to whom we devoted most of our energy, are often slower than their students to adopt the new technologies. Looking back at these projects as a whole group is rather depressing because they very rarely made the desired changes that the sponsor was hoping for. I do hope that everyone who took part in them learned a lot about ICT in education, which they put to use at a later date. It is also noticeable that as a team we did not do very much dissemination, particularly in peer-reviewed journals, but then there did not appear to be any encouragement from the university to do this.

Real changes in education, particularly in the 14-19 curriculum, will hopefully take place in the forseeable future, utilising and justifying much of the research and innovation which has taken place over the years.

2007/8
I am currently working on a European Union Minerva project, Puente, which is investigating intergenerational learning in public spaces, and how it can be enhanced by ICT. My main contribution to this has been to work with a charity, Prosiect Menai, which runs school visits to the historic bridges crossing the Menai Straits. I introduced them to enhanced podcasting, and the possibilites for delivering information on mobile devices. The next stage is to find out what this has to contribute to the formal learning sector.

2007
I completed the Level 4 couse for Adult Numeracy teachers at City of Bristol College/University of Plymouth. This was very hard work but now I'm really up to date on the latest fashions in numeracy teaching. I was surprised how little ICT was involved, but then most community-based adult numeracy teachers don't have computers in their classes.

2006
As an independent researcher, I was part of the Survey Digital team which evaluated the website for delivering online teaching resources in Wales, NGfL Cymru, for the Welsh Assembly Government. I produced a report on the website, interviewed some stakeholders and presented my conclusions at a conference. The contract has been renewed and the website has been redesigned, accommodating many of the recommendations we made.

2006
I finished my PGCE (PCET) after two years part-time study at City of Bristol College/University of Plymough. I was one of those part time teachers who Sir Claus Moser didn't approve of because I didn't have a formal teaching qualification. Not any more. It was a very good course. My optional modules were Psychology and the 14-19 curriculum.

2005
I finished my MA in Education with the University of Bangor. I specialised in the use of ICT in teaching. My dissertation was on using ICT to improve attainment and behaviour in teenage numeracy learners.

2005 Piczo website
One of the interesting things about teaching ICT is how it changes from year to year. A few years ago teenagers would arrive in college unable to word process. About five years ago they were keen to learn how to use the Internet. In 2005 they wanted to create their own websites, so I showed them how to do this with Piczo, which I initially found about from one of the students. I created my own site as a demonstration. It's got some of my favourite holiday pictures in. It was a very successful programme, particularly with the girls, with many students spending a lot of their own time on their sites, putting flashy backgrounds on and creating networks of friends.

2003-2007
My main occupation during this time was teaching on Entry Level vocational courses at City of Bristol College. In 2003 and 2004 my ICT groups at Soundwell Centre put together websites to tell people about the business which was managed by the students as part of the Young Enterprise scheme. The last website is still online in the college's student showcase. The products were excellent and the company always did well at the local stall competition.
A simple graphic website I created to explain what networks and the Internet are is published here.
I always tried to use a lot of ICT in teaching other subjects, whenever I could get my hands on computers and other equipment. In my last year I did a lot of work with using interective whiteboards in numeracy classes. I was a keen member of the college's reserch group and gave two presentations and a workshop for staff on ICT and numeracy.

2001-2 NATED/BECTA Athrawon project
I was the author of the content for a website reporting on two BECTA research projects on Wales. In both projects primary teachers were given portable computers, Internet connectivity and training and support from the Universtiy of Wales, Bangor. The earlier project, in 1998/9 focused on literacy and the later one on Numeracy (see the Cyfrif project below). The purpose of the website was twofold:

1. to provide a bank of online resoruces for teaching literacy and numeracy at Key Stage 2 in Wales, based on material developed and tested during the two projects
2. to reflect on the projects and make recommendations for the future ICT resourcing and training in primary schools.

After I left Bangor the website was taken over and published by the School of Informatics. Unfortunately it is no longer online, but three new pieces of work, originally created for the website and for MA assignments, are available on this site:

Reflections on the Cyfrif Project (MA Assignment (pdf)
Artists in Wales
Rotational Symmetry Quiz

2001 NATED Multimedia Portables for Key Stage 2 Numeracy: Cyfrif project
I was the web designer for this project, which employed five field officers working with 310 primary school teachers and local authority advisors. The field officers worked with the teachers on using ICT to enhance numeracy teaching at key stage 2. The participants were encouraged to share their experiences with other project members on online conferences. The web design included creating, administering and analysing online questionnaires using Filemaker databases. This project was hard work for everyone, in the days when Internet connections were not ubiquitous and teachers were expected to identify and solve a lot of technical problems. The foot and mouth epidemic made travel and communication very complicated at times. It was around this time that schools were starting to panic about pictures of children on their websites, worried that they might attract paedophiles. A memorable project: it's a shame the results were not disseminated more widely.

2000 UfI ADAPT project, Rheoli Dysgu Ar-lein / Managing Online Learning
The aim of this project was to create a virtual learning community of teaching staff from the Further Education sector and to introduce them to online resource organisation software. My role in this project was to design and run face-to-face and online teaching sessions and design and create the project website. This was a challenging project because of the heavy teaching committment of FE staff, the limited timescale and the limited resources for interface design for the project. We did not succeed in creating a sustainable network. The FE staff were great, but they much preferred face-to-face contact (apart from the information scientists) and thought that having to run courses online was a fate worse than death. Even today organisers are still having problems engaging teachers in online courses and collaboration.

2000 IBIS Interfaces for Bilingual Information Systems
This was a collaborative project with Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. The aim of the project was to produce a set of guidelines for designing bilingual electronic information systems, particularly websites. In order to achieve this reports were produced on literature available, current software and,current practice. Models were tested amongst user groups. We showed that, in Wales, users were quite happy with pages like the one illustrated above, where you just clicked on a link in the language you wanted to use, so you don't need to clutter up websites with "Choose Language" buttons. We also proved that people like the option of changing languages at any point in a website, but they vary rarely use it. We produced a database of current bilingual websites, and made recommendations about file organisation and architecture. Sadly, even today web designers tack extra languages on rather than incorporating them symmetrically into the website architecture. Unfortunately the only method of publication was online, so the work is not available any more.

2000 Cyfanfyd
Cyfanfyd is the Development Education Association for Wales. The website was designed as part of a project to set up a collaborative netwrok for development education in Wales. It had a simple, robust design. It incorporated searchable databases for resources and youth organisations. This project was particularly enjoyable because of the interest and enthusiasm of the staff of Cyfanfyd, and the inspiration the website gave them to be more ambitious. The website was online until June 2004 but has now been redesigned.

1999 HATT 2000: Hyfforddi Athrawon / Teacher Training
This was a collaborative project between secondary teacher training establishments in Wales, whose purpose was to develop content and infrastructure for a distance learning secondary teacher training course. My role in this project was to develop a series of on-line databases (using Filemaker) to record student profiles, assignment records and evaluation forms. Demonstration versions of the database, where the project partners could "pretend" to be students, teachers and mentors, were published online. There were also online guides for students and for tutors. The evaluation forms were particularly popular with students and staff at Bangor. This work was superceded by the next generation of databases (in php) which incorporated an online record of achievement linked to the standards document for newly qualified teachers. This would now be called an e-portfolio. I don't think it actually led to a long term collaboration between the partners in delivering PGCE secondary online.

1998 School of Education, University of Wales, Bangor
I assembled this site in early 1998 and maintained it until 2001.
This site featured a "virtual tour" which included a lot of photographs and some Quicktime panoramas. The site included my first on-line database, a telephone and e-mail directory of site staff. It has now been redesigned in the house style of the University, with considerably less detail and far fewer images.

1998 Uno (Amlgyfrwng Gogledd Cymru / North Wales Multimedia)
Tha aim of the project was to set up a computer-mediated conferencing system for use by the media industry in North Wales. I developed the teaching materials, guides to using FirstClass in English and Welsh, and delivered training sessions to representatives of media companies in North Wales. I managed the online FirstClass conference system. This desktop image was designed for the project by the artist Rhian Catrin Price.

1997 Land Use in Wales:
This was my first website and my first job at the University of Bangor. The project was concerned with the development of a multi-disciplinary, inter-departmental undergraduate module for the School of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences on land use in Wales. The research was commissioned to investigate how a small number of students could be enabled to follow a course through the medium of Welsh. The work involved setting up a bilingual website to contain the course resources, and investigating computer mediated conferences as a means of communication and assessment for the course. The website remained online until 2006. The course still runs so some of the material may still be in use, but it's not published widely any more.

Updated April 2008

Earlier ICT History