About

My name is David Hopkins. I work in the Business School at Bournemouth University as a Learning Technologist.

Who am I?
I live and work in Bournemouth, UK with my wife and (currently) one son. I graduated in the mid 1990′s from Kingston University with an honours degree in Geology and, after a short time in the UK oil & gas industry retrained myself in 1998 as a web designer and implementation consultant. Over the next 7 years I worked in a variety of Internet consultancies and as a self-employed designer. I gained experience with creating and managing online communities, which brings my up to date and to Bournemouth University as a Learning Technologist in 2007.

All views expressed on this blog, and in the posts, are personal are are not representative of my employer; the Business School or Bournemouth University.

About this blog
I started this blog to order and publish my thoughts, and to engage with educators, facilitators, technicians, designers, etc who are interested in the same kind of things, namely eLearning, mLearning, Blackbaord / CMS, simlation-based learning, technology in the classroom, etc.

I enjoy working in this evolving environment of development in theories, pedagogy, and approaches to ‘learning’. With all the hype about everything and anything online and with everything with an ‘e’ in front of it (eLearning, ePortfolio, eMail, eUniversity, etc) there’s plenty to keep me engaged and working hard. I am always trying to find out something I do not know, and to understand it, and bring it into my work so others can benefit from a new technique, a new piece of technology, or just a different style of doing the same thing … just something to bring some variety into the ‘normal’.

Why “Don’t Waste Your Time”?
When I was setting the blog up I wanted a domain and not just something like david.wordpress.com. I was doing some searches, based around my name, and was coming up blank. I thought I ought to stop wasting my time and get on with some work … hey presto, a name. www.dontwasteyourtime.co.uk.

Comments
Like all bloggers, I welcome comments! Comments are an important part of my learning process and this means I’m able to share more information with others. To leave a comment just click on the “comment” link after the post. The link may say something like “3 comments”, “Comments (0)” or even “No Comments”. Click on it anyway!

I do moderate the comments on my blog. This is only to stop the huge amount of spam that seem automated and quite filthy! I believe in openness so even if you disagree with me I’ll more than likely approve your comment; just keep it clean. OK?

Oh, and no adverts or pretending to like something when it turns out you’re actually employed by them. I want this blog and it’s comments to be honest, open, and fair and without prejudice.

WordPress
This blog / website is running the most up-to-date stable version of WordPress.

Twitter
I started using twitter early in 2009, and have realised that, without proper self-control and management, it can control and take over your life. I use my Twitter account ‘hopkinsdavid‘ for work and eLearning, I don’t use Twitter for personal and/or garbage.

Subscribe
I hope that’s given a glimpse of who I am and what I do. The best way to keep in touch with the information from this site is to subscribe to the posts, either through Twitter, RSS feed, or email subscription (see form section in right-hand navigation)

Contact
Please contact me if you are in interested in joining Don’t Waste Your Time; either from a blogging perspective, eLearning/mLearning direction, or would like to know how I run this blog.