Matthew Sillence

The following text has been adapted from a short article produced for the Centre for Staff and Educational Development (CSED) in 2008: Keeping track of the structure of a thesis is not as simple as it first seems. After a year and a half of PhD research, the nature of... [Read More]

Over the years of teaching in higher education, I have tried different approaches to lesson plans. One of the reasons for experimenting is that, in the arts and humanities, in the UK at least, there is considerable flexibility in the way that individual teaching events are designed and executed. At... [Read More]

Having spent several months working with markdown (.md) format and files, I have relocated my blog to be hosted through GitHub pages. The domain matthewsillence.org will automatically redirect to this site, and the historic posts from matthewsillence.blogspot.com will be imported into the new site.

This week’s announcement that Elon Musk has agreed a takeover deal with Twitter has prompted questions over the future of the social media platform. Personally, I find Twitter very helpful in my professional life, but I have reservations about Musk’s control of the platform. Decentralized, open-source alternatives, such as Mastodon, provide better models for... [Read More]

The world has changed dramatically over the last few weeks, and universities have been transitioning to remote working to support their staff and students and ensure business continuity. However, the last ten days of the new normal has revealed just how dependent we are on the sophisticated IT infrastructures of... [Read More]