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John Maxwell
Last updated: December 2000
I'm a PhD student at UBC, in the Centre for the Study of Curriculum and Instruction (Faculty of Ed), working with Dr. Ricki Goldman-Segall. For the past year or so I've been digging into issues surrounding the "culture gap" in information technology, especially as manifested in schools and educational settings. My doctoral research will have to do with cultural contexts surrounding digital literacy in teacher ed. And that's as much as I'm prepared to say just now.
My background is some fairly heavy-duty electronic publishing. I began as a web-geek in the early 90s, but got involved in SGML and XML while working on distributed learning system at BC's Open Learning Agency (OLA). See this paper I co-wrote with Prescott Klassen or this one by Gerry Paille for more details. More recently I've been involved in designing and building The Learning Lab at OLA, a radically learner-centered environment for teacher Pro-D.
But my real interest is in the culture of technology. I've been doing things with MUDs and MOOs for many years now (see below); I'm very interested in Open Source and Free Software stuff. Academically I've been heavily into situated learning (Lave and Wenger), actor network theory (Latour), and hermeneutics (Gadamer; Ricoeur). I'm also teaching a class on new publishing technologies in SFU's master of publishing program.
Some papers...
House of Words: Designing Text and Community in MOO Environments (1997; html) -- My Masters thesis (Publishing, SFU) on a MOO-based mock-trial role playing exercise for distance-ed high school law students.
The Survival of Roman Types (1996; html) - A paper on roman typefaces through history. The more things change, the more thy stay the same.
Resituating Constructionism (1999; pdf) -- A term paper I wrote; kind of a literature review, covering situated learning, actor network theory, and constructivism, all rolled into one.
Beyond Ethnographic Hypermedia (2000; pdf) -- An extended, cathartic rant on the hype and promises of hypermedia in social science research. Originally written as a term paper for Dr. Ricki Goldman-Segall's "Video Ethnography" seminar.
Some other things...
The cats. -- Joey and Cleo.
Line 21 Media Services -- My wife Kelly's closed-captioning and media services company.
The Idea of the Web -- Slides from a presentation on the web in communications history.
Current highly recommended list...
Zope (open-source web application/content management environment)
Questioning Technology by philosopher of technology Andrew Feenberg.
Home, Carrie Akre's fabulous solo album.
Better Environmentally Sound Transportation, a Vancouver group trying against enormous odds to get people out of their cars.