I have had a varied career as a lithographic plate-maker, factory shop-floor worker, leather-cutter, relay wirer and computer operator before my desire to learn led to me giving up work and entering academia as a full-time student.
I was over the age of 30 when I gained my bachelor’s degree. This allowed me to get a position as a research associate and also to begin my PhD. Since then I have become a lecturer and then a senior lecturer.
My desire for learning has not diminished and I am lucky to work in an environment where this is not uncommon.
Academic qualifications
- Pg.C. Higher and Professional Education
- Pg.C. Research Methods
- BSc. (Hons) Information Systems and Computing
Expertise
My expertise lie in all things web. Specifically,
- Web programming
- Web standards
- Agile development
- Ontologies and artificial intelligence
- Research
Research interests
My research interests and my teaching area are (fortunately) linked by web development. I am especially interested in:
- technologies associated with the Semantic Web
- artificial intelligence, intelligent agents and ontologies
- Test Driven Development (TDD), agile development (in general) and design patterns.
Enterprise and commercial interests
I have worked as a research associate on the Tracker project which researched the idea of being able to reduce rework through decision management. The project was successfully completed in 2004.
I am currently working on Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTP’s) through Staffordshire University.
Teaching
My teaching area is in Web Programming – primarily (though not limited to) server-side programming using either PHP or C# with ASP.NET.
I am also involved in teaching general web development including mark-up languages such as HTML5, CSS and XML, and client-side scripting using JavaScript.