Schedule for the day

Google Apps for Education, EMEA

Samantha is focused on building partnerships with Educational Institutes within EMEA; primarily by positioning Google Apps for Education to the Education community.

Prior to joining Google, Samantha spent 7 years at Bloomberg L.P. a leading Financial Services provider. At Bloomberg, Samantha managed the sales teams that covered Switzerland and Monaco. She was also responsible for developing the sales strategy for penetrating the energy markets in EMEA.

Samantha holds an MSc in International Business from King's College London and a BSc in Biotechnology from University College London.

Managing Director Virtual-E

Pauline Randall is the Managing Director of virtual-e Ltd, an e-learning and virtual worlds consultancy.

Pauline started her career in the hotel industry but quickly moved on. She spent time working with a design consultancy and then moved into retail with Sainsbury's. This led to a transfer to the training side of the business where she found her niche. During this period she gained a degree in Life Sciences from the Open University. From Sainsbury's she spent 15 years as a Partner in Randall Consultancy, a management training and development organisation. As part of her personal development she studied for and was awarded a Post Graduate Diploma (Distinction) in Administration and Information Management A move into the more formal side of education brought her to Further Education in Scotland where she specialised in virtual learning environments and advising academic staff on the use of ICT in the curriculum.

Pauline is particularly interested in the development and use of new technologies in education and training. She is a listed Second Life Solution Provider and has carried out virtual world developments for several organisations including a market research company in Florida, the Wales Museums and Libraries (CyMAL) and Imperial College London and on-going projects for Ashridge Business School and the University of Hawaii. She has recently completed a post graduate course on teaching and learning in Second Life with Boise State University, Idaho.

She speaks regularly at conferences on the use of virtual worlds such as Second Life and how they can be integrated into learning and teaching.

CEO JANET(UK)

Tim started his career in BBC TV, winning awards as an OB TV Producer and rising to become Head of Events and Assistant Head of Sports and Events Group where he was responsible for the coverage of major national events as well as sports, factual and entertainment content.

In 1990 Tim moved to Walt Disney as Senior Vice-President and MD of Buena Vista Productions, where he was responsible for all international production of TV and new media including a wide variety of educational, factual and fiction content.

In 2000 Tim joined a new ?dotcom?, Wide Learning, as Chief Operating Officer, a company producing on-line financial and regulatory e-learning content as well as developing a bespoke Learning and Content Management System.

In March 2005 Tim became CEO at JANET, the organisation responsible for providing JANET, the UK's powerful world class research, learning and education network.

Tim is a graduate of Southampton University in Sociology, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and Member of the British Computer Society and the Royal Television Society.

Tim has been engaged at the Manchester Commonwealth Games, the Athens and Beijing Olympics as part of the international broadcast quality assurance team.

BBC Backstage

Ian Forrester heads up the BBC's Backstage, a developer/designer network like no other. His role as head of BBC Backstage includes working with internal and external developers/designers to express their creativity through BBC feeds and APIs. Backstage makes available as much BBC data as possible for any member of the public to republish, remix and mash-up under a non-commercial license.

Ian is also well known for geek social events, including London Geekdinners, BarCampLondon, Hackday, Mashed, Edinburgh TV Un-Festival and recently Over the Air. He?s currently master minding plans for something which will raise the profile of development and geeks in the UK, a series of Backstage outreach events and is a founder of the dataportability.org group. Somehow, Ian finds time to blog online regularly at his personal blog cubicgarden.com

Yahoo!, web developer

A web developer working at Yahoo!, for finance.yahoo.com and the Yahoo Developer Network. James has been developing websites for over 5 years and has an expressed interest in the semantic web.

James can be found contributing and sharing his knowledge through his personal blog at carbonsilk.com

Senior e-learning Advisor, ULCC

Philip worked in the post-16 education sector as a teacher and manager for 25 years and developed a strong interest in Technology Enhanced Learning.

He was amongst the founding members of JISC Regional Support Centre for London and helped establish it as a widely recognised centre of excellence and expertise.

As a Senior e-Learning Adviser, his main interest and responsibility was for developing regional strategies that support the effective use of Virtual Learning Environments and e-Learning.

He now works for the University of London Computer Centre and has worked as a consultant on several major projects for national advisory boards with JISC, NIACE, BECTA, NLN, etc. along with presenting at regional and national conferences in the UK and India.

Business Development Manager - LMN

In the past five years, Maria worked as an education management professional specialising in new business development, partnership deals and devising value-adding services for the education and public sectors.

At present, she is Business Development Manager at the London Metropolitan Network, which provides fast and secure communication links, IT services and related training for London's academic community. Prior to that she worked as Director of Neuroscience Research at University College London and with a biotech company owned by King's College London.

Maria was trained in business consultancy at the London Technology Network of the London Business School. She has a PhD in Behavioural Neuroscience from University College London, a BSc in Biomedical Sciences from Kingston University and she is a Visiting Lecturer at University of London.

Head of IT Research and Development, Ravensbourne College

Miles is responsible for the College's IT strategy, and for developing the technical resources the institution needs to face the challenges of creative technology in the 21st century. His areas of interest are user-owned technology, equality, mobility, and the cloud

Senior Manager Higher Education (EMEA), Apple

John has expertise in designing enterprise services to support 21st-century learning environments. He also has a strong background working with information security.

Prior to working at Apple, John worked in both Academic and Administrative computing services for private universities in the United States. For the past 14 years John worked with higher education customers in US as an Apple System Engineer.

His interest include hiking, camping, college sports and photography.

e-learning Advisor, RSC South East

Harold Fricker is one of the UK's foremost experts in using podcasting to enhance the learning experience. Podcasting became an integral part of his teaching practice in 2005.

His lecturing backgrounds in HE and FE, together with his innovative use of technologies in education give him a special understanding of the way to integrate technology to benefit the learner, teaching staff and the organisation. His knowledge is focused on crossing the boundaries between practice and theory.

?The FOTE conference is a great opportunity to consider the range of emerging technologies we can embed as part of everyday teaching and learning practice. ULCC has been creative and proactive at setting up this exciting event that responds to the needs of a growing community?

Online Communications Officer, University of Warwick

Tom has responsibility for the development and management of the University's external website and provides support for departments in developing online communications strategies.

Within this role Tom provides content support for the external website and ensures that sites are accurate, usable and accessible both in terms of structure and content.

Tom oversees the University's corporate identity online and works with departments to ensure that the identity is correctly implemented. As part of his role Tom is also responsible for the annual review of the University web presence and analysing web usage.

Co-founder and CEO, Huddle.net

Since graduating with MSc in Engineering from Southampton University, where he learnt how to build boats and submarines, Alastair has spent the last 10 years in the online services industry.

During early years, he helped to build the first online market place for the global food commodities market, which provided marketing, auction and logistics capabilities to companies across Europe, Africa and the Far East. There he also became a professionally trained tea taster. Alastair then moved to dunnhumby, where he led the growth of its web-based marketing intelligence product to £20m in three years. Alastair joined dunnhumby’s Strategic Management Board in 2005 to head up the group’s Shopping Experience practice, a $60m+ business globally.

Alastair's grandfather was the inspiration behind starting his own dot-com, Huddle.net. To celebrate this, Huddle's holding company is named after one of grandfather's inventions - Ninian, the biggest concrete platform ever built.

When not running the company, Alastair enjoys skiing, snowboarding, hiking, diving and driving. The latter has become an infrequent affair as Alastair passionately believes in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

He also kindly offered to sponsor our Drinks reception. Thanks again, Alastair!