Hazel Owen
Hazel Owen has been involved for nearly eleven years with ICT enhanced learning and teaching across all sectors in New Zealand and overseas (including six years in the Middle East). She is now an education consultant with the company Ethos Consultancy NZ, which focuses on offering creative ways to scaffold and engage learners, as well as resources and tailored advice on strategy, and planning and design solutions for ICT enhanced education and training.
Following research informed approaches and design, Hazel applies a qualitative, iterative process to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions, programmes and tools, encouraging learners' voices and input from all stakeholders. She is also especially interested in exploring ways that blended approaches to Professional Development can create trust, rapport and encourage reflective practice.
Hazel is a strong advocate of the potential of social networking to empower learners from all walks of life and cultures, where they can develop their own personalised learning environments. In particular, she is interested how ePortfolios can be used across all sectors and in vocational education and training, (especially multimedia where literacy and language challenges are faced), in Recognition of Prior Learning, and in authentic, applied assessment. She believes that humans are social beings, although not everyone enjoys working in groups, or feel comfortable when with others. Rather it is more that, working collaboratively, one person's idea can be questioned, extended and enhanced by ideas contributed by others. This can be taken forward until the first idea is enriched way beyond the point the initial person conceived of it alone. It can also help with understanding, concept checking and reflection. The interactions do not have to be synchronous or face-to-face.