Brains working towards machine consciousness

Contextual Statement

I provided work based learning for colleagues as part of my role as Information Systems Support Coordinator at Thames Water. I developed and delivered IT training courses, including Lotus 123, Word Perfect 5, Windows 95 and Office 95 and Lotus notes. I developed Notes discussion forums and intranet pages to support learners. During this time I also designed and taught adult education classes in basic IT skills on Apple Macs, including introducing learners to the internet and to search tools.

I returned to University to read BSc Intelligent Systems, graduating in 2005 (1st class), and my final project was a simple educational demonstrator to help students learn about the dynamic stability of systems of interacting species.

I gained my MSc Applied Informatics (Distinction), and have gone on to study eLearning systems in the context of designing caring personal agents for my PhD (in progress).

At the University of Reading, initally as a student and subsequently as a Research Assistant, I designed and implemented a Moodle installation for our School of Systems Engineering Community, and participated in the implementation of a .NetNuke community which ran alongside it. I advocated and enthusiastically participated in collaborative peer based learning using the institutional VLE (Blackboard), and have provided support via this system to students in tutor groups and lab sessions which I have been involved in teaching.

I have been the principal architect for the design of the MeAggregator(TM) project, which seeks to provide learners with greater control over their published materials, and sources. I have been involved with operational maintenance and development of our ELGG instance called RedGloo, the Moodle and WordPressMU installs for the MUVEnation project, WordPressMU for mobi-blog and LLL3d and more recently I am responsible for the new ELGG1.0 instance for the thisisme project.

I am working on designing systems which adapt to the user, offering them advice on their learning path through their formal courses. As a result of several surveys of learners, I am keen to try to ensure that there are a range of learning technologies available to students to provide for the diversity of experience, ability and needs with which the HE sector is faced. This can produce interesting conflicts between fulfilling user requirements and providing cost effectiveness.

I try to keep colleagues and students abreast of what I am working on through a range of online media, including this site, my RedGloo blog and my Twitter account as well as on Facebook and, of course, in person.

CMALT is an important accreditation to me because I firmly believe that with a growing and changing HE population it is increasingly important to understand and provide eLearning tools which support both formal and informal learning. The range of available technologies is also increasing and adapting, and we can no longer afford to think of the underlying system as the whole of the technology - we need to understand and apply the benefits of systems which include the user contributed data as a fundamental part of the tool, such as social bookmarking systems. I am deeply fascinated by the learning process, in people, animals and machines, and plan to continue doing research in this area.

The CMALT accreditation will, I believe, help me continue in this path, by providing evidence of my commitment to exploring new technologies and applying them to real learning scenarios. Furthermore it provides evidence of the collaborative nature of the work, and of my commitment to disseminating the results of my research throughout the UK HE sector.