Derrin Kent’s Blog

Hi!

This Blog is speaking about me as a professional person only.

Nowadays, I see myself as being some sort of hybrid between an adult learning professional, a business manager and an Open Source Software geek.

People with this combination of skills usually call themselves a “Knowledge Manager”. But, I call myself The Development Manager instead - this is because I like to make sure my work takes an organisation from one place to another instead of just managing what’s already there.

I have worked exclusively in adult education and management since graduating in Education Studies in 1988. I have been interested in e-Learning and web design since 1999 and in Open Source Software since 2005. I have an M-Level Adult Teaching qualification (English as a Foreign Language Teaching - hence the interest in linguistics) from Cambridge University and I am also a qualified Linux professional with the Linux Professional Institute.  I speak Spanish pretty fluently (Spanish is the dominant language in my family home) and, after warming up for about an hour, I can also hold my own in Brazilian Portuguese.

I also have a strong track-record as a tender-writer who can win government-funding and I have a strong personal commitment to open standards and to equitable, sustainable international development in the emerging information age.

My professional interest areas are:

• Knowledge Management
• Work-Based Learning
• Corporate Training
• Management Training
• Tendering for Government Funds
• Delivering e-learning with Moodle, DrupalED and other Open Source Applications
• Designing e-learning programmes for others
• Online e-learning facilitator training and development
• Installation and support of Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) applicatons: Moodle, Joomla!, Mahara, Alfresco, Wordpress, MediaWiki, Twiki, dotProject, vTiger, Ubuntu, OpenOffice, etc. etc.
• Open Source IT training - for all the applications mentioned previously, including training people to use the Linux desktop
• Basic XHTML / CSS training
• English Language Teaching
• English Language Analysis
• Teacher/Trainer training, particularly English Language Teacher Training
• English<>Spanish Translation