How I got here.
I tend to be early to the work that later becomes obvious. Open Badges in 2011, before employers cared about alternative credentials: Digital and web literacies before digital skills and AI literacy were priorities for policymakers. Federated social networks before “digital sovereignty” was discussed in the boardroom.
I didn’t pick these frameworks up from someone else. I helped build them, and I’m technical enough to act as a translation layer between developers, educators, staff, and senior leaders.
Three kinds of work overlap in my career: practitioner, researcher, and movement-builder. They map onto the triad on the home page: thinking, making, and recognising are the same conversation.
The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies approach is still cited and adopted more than a decade after my doctoral thesis. Mozilla still uses the Web Literacy Map I stewarded to underpin their manifesto, over a decade on. MoodleNet forked into Bonfire and is still live. I build things that last.
- 2014–now Dynamic Skillset Ltd: my independent consultancy. Ten years of client work across education, civil society, and international NGOs.
- 2016–26 We Are Open Co-op: founding member of a worker co-operative providing consultancy, facilitation, and research to mission-driven organisations.
- 2023–24 PGCert Systems Thinking in Practice (Open University). Frameworks and tools for making sense of a volatile, uncertain world, now folded into every client engagement.
- 2018–20 Moodle HQ: Product Manager, conceiving and delivering MoodleNet, the world’s first decentralised digital commons for educators.
- 2012–15 Mozilla Foundation: Badges & Skills Lead, then Web Literacy Lead. 50+ conferences. A standard adopted by IBM and others. Over 100 stakeholders worldwide.
- 2010–12 Jisc infoNet, based at Northumbria University, supporting national programmes in FE and HE. Finished my Ed.D. with a thesis on digital literacies.
- 2004–10 Secondary school teacher and Director of E-Learning at Northumberland Church of England Academy, a nine-site institution of 3,500 people, with a seat on the Senior Leadership Team.
Banner image: detail from an image by Philippe Oursel on Unsplash.