UKOLN Workshop:
Biographical Details

Steven Warburton is an e-learning ICT manager at King's College London with a wealth of experience in the implementation and evaluation of learning technology within a variety of educational settings. He has managed both technical and pedagogically driven e-learning projects that have included work on personal publishing tools, social software, virtual learning environments, and the development of blended teaching programmes. He provides consultancy both within/out the University specialising in the support of distributed/distance learners. His research interests have been eclectic having moved from neuroscience through to computing and now focussing on questions of online learner identity, social networking and the notion of learner communities. This current research focus has been reflected in recent presentations that have covered the topics of social computing, the collaborative aspects of blogs and wikis, actor network theory and communities of practice.

Steven gave a talk on "Wikis and Collaboration: Approaches to Deploying Wikis in Educational Settings".

Steven can be contacted at <steven.warburtonkcl.ac.uk>.

Henry Rzepa is Professor of Computational Chemistry at the Department of Chemistry, Imperial College London. His entry into the "Internet World" occurred around 1987, when as a member of a journal advisory board of the Royal Society of Chemistry, he was asked to consider solutions to the problem of archiving the rich stream of data beginning to emerge in digital form from many articles published in the journal. The CLIC enhanced journal project, which ran during 1995-1997, investigated ways of capturing data in a chemically semantically rich manner and exposing it via journal pages; similar experiments in Electronic conferencing (the ECTOC series, 1995-1998; the Exemplarchem series, 2000-2005) explored how (chemistry) research scientists and students would respond to such environments. During this period, he collaborated in the development of CML (Chemical Markup Language, 1996-present), which evolved into an extensive set of modular schemas for embedding in Open data-rich environments. Latterly, the focus has been on the metadata side, providing semantic hooks for enabling the interoperability of these environments into other sciences.

As well as the informatics research, Professor Rzepa has an active program in quantum chemical modelling of important chemical systems and reactions. His recent discoveries include a novel class of conjugated molecules, which exhibit aromaticity arising from higher-twist Mobius rings (actually, paradromic topologies sustaining two or four half twists), and the first unravelling of the origins of polymeric stereo-regularities (tacticities) in new classes of polymerisation reactions designed to use sustainable bio-resources rather than geochemical stocks such as oil.

Henry gave a talk on "Wikis and (Meta)data Rich Environments: a Model for Scholarly Publishing".

Henry can be contacted at <Henry.Rzepaic.ac.uk>.

Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus - a post funded by the JISC and MLA which provides advice and support to the UK Higher and Further Education communities and the museums, libraries and archives sector on Web issues. Brian is based at UKOLN.

Brian's interests include Web standards, Web accessibility, quality assurance for Web services and innovative Web developments, including collaborative Web tools, Web 2.0 developments, etc.

Brian gave a talk on "Reflections On Personal Experiences In Using Wikis". Brian is also a member of the workshop organising committee.

Brian can be contacted at <b.kellyukoln.ac.uk>.

Phil Wilson is a Web Software Developer for the University of Bath where he develops n-tier J2EE web applications, and has been doing this for various companies for five years. Philip's interests include Web standards, Web usability, collaborative Web tools, Firefox hacking and the Semantic Web.

Phil gave a talk on "Evaluating Wikis: A Case Study".

Phil can be contacted at <p.g.wilson bath.ac.uk>.

Brian Kelly is chair of the programme committee. Brian Kelly's details are given above.

Steven Warburton is co-chair of the programme committee. Steven Warburton's details are given above.

Natasha Bishop is the Events and Marketing Manager at UKOLN with responsibility for all events undertaken by the organisation along with marketing the organisation to the wider community. Natasha has over 7 years of experience at organising events and has been at UKOLN since October 2003. Natasha has responsibility for the workshop organisation and administration.