The last piece of work I was involved in for Futurelab was the Beyond Current Horizons project, a two-year foresight programme funded by the DCSF, looking at possible futures for education over the next couple of decades to 2030, in the context of social and technological change. I led the evidence-gathering and scenario construction work, commissioning and reviewing work from academics around the world, developing an appropriate methodology and trying to get a group of incredibly senior and well-respected academics to take me seriously in workshops. I’m on the organising committee of the ESRC-funded seminar series Educational Futures, which aims to explore links between education research and futures studies.

Before that I spent most of my time looking at games and learning, most recently in Singapore with the Information Development Agency, working with local and international institutions, learners, firms, researchers and policy-makers to explore the different ways in which games and mobile technologies might find a place in Singaporean education, and before that I was the lead researcher on a project examining the practicalities of using commercial games in formal education, Teaching with Games. I’m on the editorial review board of the International Journal of Game-Based Learning.

I’ve been asked to speak at many events, mainly on learning in games and futures in education, all over the UK, in the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, Singapore and the US. I enjoy travelling and working with people from other countries. I’ve spent a lot of time facilitating workshops and moderating events, for national governments and senior policy makers, academics, teachers, local authorities, educators, technologists and students. Some people have been kind enough to decribe talks I’ve given as “inspiring”, “thought-provoking” and “stimulating”, though people have also said “irrelevant and confusing” and “waaaaay too long”. Practice makes perfect.

“Thank you for getting our conference off to a cracking start”

Hertfordshire BSF programme, 2009

I made some games for other people — one called Harpbeat for the Interesting Games Festival in 2008, about invisible connections and making a giant harp out of people, and one for the Arnolfini gallery, as part of their 2009 Futurology season, about fugitives from different futures.

Bristol University awarded me an MSc in Education, Technology and Society, with distinction, in 2010, and I’m still a Research Fellow there. My dissertation described a theoretical approach to analysing the design of mobile learning experiences that drew on accounts of the social construction of space to offer a practical way of acknowledging the fundamentally embodied nature of such experiences, which many theories of mobile learning don’t really recognise. It was a real page-turner, with something for every reader.

If you like Linkedin, I’m on there. In my spare time I enjoy not having an editor.