I am an associate professor at Athabsaca University, Canada, where I teach computing in the School of Computing and Information Systems and research with the many great and the good researchers at Athabasca, as part of the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute. I also teach, research and promote learning technologies at the University of Brighton, UK, where I am a part-time senior lecturer with the Centre for Learning and Teaching.

I research in the broad area of network-based learning (though with some other interests including cross-cultural collaboration, learning communities, adaptivity, educational systems & complexity, and metadata) with a general theme of finding ways that crowds can help each other to learn.

I can usually teach my way out of a paper bag - I was a recipient of the University of Brighton's teaching excellence award 2005, and am a National Teaching Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in the UK.

I live in Canada and have places in Edmonton and Vancouver, but I also spend time in Brighton, which means I get a lot of Aeroplan miles and am usually mildly jet-lagged. I am married and have two very grown-up kids. I like to sing and play guitar, and used to do that for a living throughout most of the 1980s and early 1990s, an occupation that my first degree in philosophy prepared me for fairly well (at least, as well as it prepared me for anything). After taking an MSc in Information Systems I spent much of the 1990s managing technical support facilities and teams, including network and database management as well as running a help desk. I was lured into academia in the late 1990s and have been doing that kind of thing ever since. I have a PhD on the subject of self-organisation in network-based learning environments, which continues to fascinate me.