Giselle Ferreira

Dr Giselle Ferreira is a Lecturer at the Department of Communication and Systems at the UK Open University (UK OU), a Fellow at the university’s Centre for Open Learning of Mathematics, Science, Computing and Technology, COLMSCT, and a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy. She joined the OU in 1999 with a strong multidisciplinary background, and since then she has contributed to the development and evaluation of a number of courses whilst maintaining a direct involvement in student support via the tutorial role provided by Associate Lectureships in various courses. Giselle has recently completed a period of secondment to OpenLearn, the OU’s open content initiative, to which she contributed as a Member of the Academic Team based at the OU’s Institute of Educational Technology during the pilot stage of the project.Giselle’s research interests revolve broadly around the impact of Web technologies on education, with a special focus on the changes fostered by the availability of open educational resources. She has a long-standing concern with the concept of ‘boundaries’, and she is particularly interested in the impact of open content on previously established boundaries between teacher/learner, formal/informal learning, training/education, content/presentation and, crucially, in how the blurring of these boundaries may have an impact on the location of ‘value’ within current views of education in which marketing rhetoric and business discourses predominate. Giselle has also maintained an active interest in issues related to open and distance teaching and learning in music technology, her original subject area, and she is a Member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Music, Technology and Education.