Conference Co-Chairs

Jonathan Drori led BBC Education’s groundbreaking digital efforts and became Head of Commissioning for bbc.co.uk. Originally he was a BBC director and executive producer, responsible for dozens of television series on science, education and the arts. Since then he has worked in Government and is now a director of a media and education consultancy, Trustee of Kew Gardens and Chairman of the UK Parliament’s advisory council on public engagement.

Sarah Sherman has worked in learning technology for over 10 years. She currently manages the Bloomsbury Learning Environment (a shared e-learning service for five London HE institutions). Sarah coordinates regional and national e-learning user groups and is involved in a number of JISC projects and activities.

Julie Voce is the E-learning Services Manager at Imperial College London. Julie is deputy editor of ALT News Online and a member of the ALT Publications and Membership Services Committees. She chairs the UCISA Academic Support Group and is involved with the biennial UCISA Survey of Technology Enhanced Learning.

Plenary Speakers

Plenary presenters: Eric Mazur, Natasa Milic-Frayling and Richard Noss.

Welcoming address: Nancy Rothwell.

Eric Mazur, Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Harvard University. Mazur is an internationally recognised scientist and researcher in optical physics. In addition to his work in physics, Mazur is particularly interested in science education: he devotes part of his research group's effort to education research and finding verifiable ways to improve science education. He has been developing Peer Instruction as a method for teaching large lecture classes interactively for over 20 years.

Natasa Milic-Frayling, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge. Milic-Frayling sets research directions for the Integrated Systems group, an inter-disciplinary team focused on the design, prototyping and evaluation of information and communication systems. Her current research interests include support for sharing and making sense of digital information in collaborative settings; analysing social media networks and user interaction in online communities; cross-platform computing to enable coherent user experience across mobile, desktop, web, and cloud environments.

Richard Noss, co-director of the London Knowledge Lab and Professor of Mathematics Education at the Institute of Education. Noss directs the Technology Enhanced Learning Research Programme, funded jointly by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, a national research programme that seeks to push forward the frontiers of the design and application of technology for learning. he has directed some 20 research projects, all of which have focused on some mix of technology-enhanced learning, mathematics, and - for the last ten or so years - workplace learning.

Nancy Rothwell has since July 2010 been President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Manchester where she still maintains an active research group in the field of neuroscience. Her current research focuses on the role of inflammation in brain disease and has identified the role of the cytokine interleukin-1 (IL-1) in diverse forms of brain injury. Nancy Rothwell is President of the Society of Biology, a non-executive director of AstraZeneca and a member of the Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology. In 2004 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and in 2005 was honoured with a DBE.