Innovation in Language Learning

NICK KEARNEY is the director of ANDAMIO EDUCATION AND TECHNOLOGY, which is an SME based in Valencia, Spain, founded in 2009 to provide consultancy services in the field of education, with a special focus on the integration of new, and older technologies into teaching and learning. Prior to forming ANDAMIO he worked for 12 years as ICT/Learning Coordinator at Florida Centre de Formació Educational Cooperative in Valencia, Spain.

He has a Master of Education from the Open University, UK and is currently finishing his doctorate in education from the same institution. He has won prizes for translation from the UK Institute of Linguists, and has the Dip TEFLA in English Language Teaching from the UK Royal Society of Arts.

He has been working in teacher training and educational management for over 20 years. He has been extensively involved in the development of new learning approaches based on the use of ICT in a wide range of educational and training contexts, including secondary and university education, and vocational and continuous training, including entrepreneur training.

His work has included a large number of EU and nationally financed projects in which he has worked as coordinator and participant. This has included extensive work on technology integration in schools, vocational training, higher education and adult learning contexts, and the areas of focus have included, amongst others, the use of technologies for STEM education, the educational uses of games, the use of mobile technologies, teacher training, multicultural learning, language learning and CLIL, and the uses of social media.

He has worked extensively as a reviewer of projects and evaluator of project proposals for DG_IST under FP5, 6 and 7, for the EACEA under the Lifelong Learning Programme and for previous initiatives such as Socrates and Minerva, and for the REA. He has also undertaken similar work for project consortia as external evaluator.

He was the coordinator of the Pedagogies Group in the EU Prometeus initiative, which involved interaction with a wide range of stakeholders and participation in the organisation of a range of conferences and seminars on e-learning. He has spoken widely at a range of international conferences and served on a range of different conference scientific committees (Educa Madrid, CSEDU, CIAMTE, JCYL E-learning). He also acted as moderator and reviewer at a range of conferences l including Online Educa, (Madrid and Berlin) and published widely in books and journals, ranging from El País to the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Area/s of Expertise: Transnational cooperation, project management and evaluation, higher education, school education, adult education, third age education, voluntary work and fundraising, vocational training, e-learning, language learning, languages for specific purposes, literacy.