Much like Ned, I’ve forgotten to introduce myself properly, so I’m rectifying that this morning!
I’m Matthew Harrington, and you may or may not have seen me floating around the community attempting to be helpful on occasion (hence why I’ve ended up a moderator on here). I’m fine with Matthew or Matt, depending on how many letters you want to type or pronounce.
I started out with Open edX with the Open University over in the UK back in 2015, training authors on how to author courses in the platform, and since then I’ve moved on to working with Appsembler as part of their Customer Success team, as well as a little freelance consulting on the side through my own little consultancy company, Delta Rook. I spoke at Open edX 2017 and led a training workshop at Open edX 2018 that I’m sad I didn’t record at the time. Couldn’t get over to the US for the 2019, but hope to meet some of you again in person for 2020 as it’s over this side of the world!
I’m a dabbler in a bunch of different areas with a background in games design - my degree is actually in “Digital Music & Computer Games Design”, rather than anything directly learning-related - which I do my best to apply to learning design, as I’ve worked with enough authors over time and read enough articles to at least think I know what I’m doing. A while back I created a bunch of really bad XBlocks to make authoring easier for non-technical authors, which shows about the limits of my technical ability, but I like to think that low level of knowledge I have gives me enough of a background to bridge that gap between educators and developers which has often come in handy.
Outside of the Open edX world, I’m a D&D and MTG addict, a terrible fantasy author and general massive nerd. Feel free to talk to me about dungeon mastering and the overlap I think it has with course development, but don’t mention Brexit, I’ll just get mad. You can find me on the community slack as @matthaton, as well as on Twitter and LinkedIn if you want to come and say hi! I’m also on GitHub, but there’s not a huge amount there for you to see!
…That was far too many words.
