I am an educationalist who began an interest in how we learn through coaching figure skating in my late teens. Or maybe it began when a cover teacher in our GCSE Sociology lesson asked us to debate ‘why do you come to school?’. Or maybe it was when I was working a Saturday job at Nottingham Ice Rink in the ticket office, and this amazing machine, a Compaq 486, was introduced to manage our ticket sales and no one else wanted to learn how to use it.

Since then I have been fortunate enough to learn my way through many years of formal education, at three great ‘Universities Of’, from a BSc Computer Science at Nottingham, through a PGCE Secondary ICT at Warwick, MSc Educational Research at Manchester, to PhD in Computing Education also at Manchester. I’m considering an MBA just to see the look on my Dad’s face.

I have practiced my way through a breadth of jobs, from software engineer and bid manager at Marconi, through project coordinator at 2WM and 3T Education, Secondary ICT teacher, Computing At School regional coordinator to Learning Technologist in Computer Science at UoM. Currently I’m working at the University of Manchester in the Manchester Institute of Education as a Lecturer in Digital Technologies, Communication and Education. I also volunteer as a governor for Adlington Primary School and as a Director of a NFP preschool, The Hollies Preschool.

I’m particularly interested in how we learn through digital making, the discourses and pedagogy of computational and critical thinking, social theories of learning and in using Q methodology to explore learning. In the world of computation I have a long standing interest in how computational developments influence theories of mind and learning, and more recently have cast the net wider to enjoy how theories of complexity contribute, particularly Stuart Kauffman’s work. I have a permanent brain crush on Dewey, and currently loving Wittgenstein too. One of the great privileges of my time doing a PhD was the opportunity to read his lectures at Cambridge in 1937 (Diamond, 1975) to, among others, Alan Turing – something I would never otherwise have come across. I’m still amazed that I can sit and ‘listen’ to those two great voices debate the fundamental nature of logic. In all these areas, I’m exploring what Freire (1987) calls coherence, “Narrowing the distance between discourse and practice”.

Diamond, C. (1975) Wittgenstein’s Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, Cambridge 1939. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press

Freire, P., & Macedo, D. (1987). Literacy: Reading the Word and the World. London: Routledge.