The significant part of my career has been involved in supporting education and training, which latterly involved engagement in formal study. My involvement has been largely through the application of film, television and audio, supported later by interactive technologies. But even before my main involvement began I spent a year with VSO teaching engineering and science at a technical college in Nigeria, and while doing post graduate research at the University of Bangor I took undergraduate ‘surgery’ sessions in maths.
Looking back at where I started as a producer with the BBC working with the Open University, I can see that while I was interested in developing my media production credentials I was equally concerned with how students might learn from what I was producing. So I think I can lay claim to having a strong educational bent from the outset.
Working with the Open University was in a sense ‘easy’ in that the use of film, radio and television was seen as a given, with most academics happy to participate. I learnt an awful lot to do with approach and technique in that environment, but politically it was very much with the grain. However, on moving to a ‘traditional’ university some years later the use of media in learning was far from accepted, and where it was recognised it was mainly seen as being useful purely as a functional record of some process, rather than being a stimulating entity to excite or motivate learners. This forced me to think hard about the role of media alongside traditional modes of learning and teaching, and it stimulated me to take the part-time MEd in Teaching and Learning in 1997. My final dissertation, “Imagine This: an investigation into the ‘imaginative’ use of video in teaching”, focused on academics’ attitudes to what I called ‘imaginative video’ and how that fitted with their concepts of ‘good teaching. The study was aimed at informing my own practice, which it did in giving me a deeper understanding of the values of my client group (university teachers), as well as giving me a good grounding in research methods. For reasons of keeping the study contained I concentrated on video, but the work had wider applicability to the use of e-learning generally
While all of the above relates to higher education, that has not been the sum total of my experience. For a short period from September 1987 I was head of an industrial film unit dedicated to training and technical programmes; that was with the old Central Electricity Generating Board. There we worked with the CEGB’s National Training Centre to produce video material in support of training, as well as covering technical topics for dissemination within the organisation and related industries. On leaving the CEGB I worked successfully for five years in the freelance world, producing training and information video for companies such as British Telecom, Laporte, the UK Government's Department of Energy, the Institute of Physics, IBM, National Westminster Bank, and Boots. I also retained work within the newly privatised electricity supply industry, namely with Powergen, National Power and Nuclear Electric. This gave me a firm grounding in producing for the needs of industrial and commercial clients, which although similar in some ways to producing for higher education, differs in the stricter remit usually required. I know I embrace both disciplines well.