Glen O’Hara took his PhD at University College London in 2002 under the supervision of Professor Kathleen Burk, UCL's Professor of Modern History. In 2001 he was appointed Lecturer in Economic History at the University of Bristol, where he spent a year before moving to New College, Oxford, as Lecturer in Modern History. He took up his present post as a Lecturer at Oxford Brookes in January 2005, and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in January 2006. He is a Senior Lecturer at New York University in London, and during November 2006 he was a Visiting Fellow of the University of Oslo.

Dr. O’Hara is primarily interested in British central governments’ economic and social policies since 1918, focusing especially on the post-Second World War era. He has recently released a book about British economic and social planning in the 1960s; an edited collection about the Wilson governments of those years has also just been published by Routledge.

'Blue, White and Green Nation: Britain and the Sea since 1600': Online and Collaborative Learning Using a Wiki

This project will involve students’ collection of primary sources for each week of Glen O’Hara’s ‘Britain and the Sea’ course (which will next run in early 2009) at Oxford Brookes University. This growing collection will consist of manuscript written sources, paintings, drawings, government documents, architects’ plans, shipbuilders’ sketches, graphs, tables and charts. These will help to illustrate the main themes of the course: British peoples’ movement across the oceans; discovery; violence and ‘transgression’ at sea; and lastly, visions and representations of maritime life. Further examples of material that will be used on the site include Abolitionist posters opposing the slave trade, explorers’ maps from the sixteenth century, posters advertising slaves for sale, and oil paintings of ships from the golden age of sail, presently held at the National Maritime Museum.

The students will be asked to find new original material, so that in time a large database of sources is built up as a resource for future students. It is hoped that, through working with students, the archive of these original sources will grow progressively every time it is run. It is hoped that this Wiki will provide a deeper and broader learning experience for students; experiment with placing original research materials on the Web, and further inform students’ course-specific knowledge. The project will also investigate how collaborative online teaching methods can be used for students.