I wrote this blog post together with the fantastic folks at 448 Studio with whom I have worked on their Scottish Enterprise grant over the past 18 months. To find out more about them visit https://www.448.studio/ The university lecture is in trouble. In educational circles it has long been criticised…

Four questions to ask before you start — Maybe it’s my old artist genes, but I’m quite the sucker for the cool breeze of the blank page. Whether it’s an artwork or an app, the point of inception conjures boundless possibilities; Nothing has yet gone wrong. Anything might happen. And so over the past few years, like a…

Student absenteeism is a perennial problem in higher education. As a lecturer, I’ve frequently stood in half-filled auditoriums feeling powerless in the face of poor turnout. The issue is more pronounced in the world of online teaching. The attendance in my classes dropped from an average of 65% in pre-pandemic…

For the past year or so I’ve been thinking about classrooms, how they work, and how we might use technology to improve them. I’ve been experimenting and building tools to do this in the online context, and, on Thursday last week, this work came to fruition with the launch of…

Around 1:00 AM, on a night just before Christmas in 2009, I sat at my desk and wept tears of frustrated exhaustion into my laptop. Having enthusiastically pitched an interactive piece for 12 performers and escalator for a festival in January, I’d just started work on the implementation and it…

When I was 14 I took my French GCSE. My French teacher, Madame Percival, had studied the exam and mark scheme intricately. She taught us just the right grammatical constructions to achieve the highest marks. ‘Au bord de la mer’ was worth a particularly high number of marks, so we…

Before I talk about programming, I’d like to put forward a theory: every discipline has its own myths. I’m referring to those beliefs about a discipline’s nature which, though commonly held by its own practitioners, are nonetheless false. I use the word myth to indicate a degree of mysticism, often…