Speakers

Prof Jim Boyle

Professor Jim Boyle started his academic career as an applied mathematician before taking a doctorate in Mechanical Engineering, later followed by a DSc for innovative research contributions in high temperature design. He has been a Full Professor in Mechanical Engineering since 1990 and Head of Department since 2000, in between holding visiting professorial appointments in USA, Sweden, Japan, Tunisia (through UNESCO), Poland, Russia and Brasil. His main areas of technical research lie in creep, plasticity and computational mechanics with special reference to high temperature design problems. Major practical applications continue to lie in the field of pressure vessel and piping design and design by analysis which has resulted in around three hundred research papers, three monographs and numerous industrial reports. Invited lectures have been given in sixteen countries including six Plenary Lectures (most recently the IUTAM 2000 Creep in Structures Symposium in Japan and the opening lecture at the 2001 Canadian Applied Mechanics Conference in Newfoundland). For the past seven years considerable effort has been applied to bring about a major change in engineering education through a re-emphasis on teaching and learning. Developer of the New Approaches to Teaching and Learning in Engineering project which aims to introduce active, inquiry-led learning into the curriculum through Socratic Dialogue and Peer Instruction in large classes, a version of Problem-Based Learning applied to design teaching and the use of Studio Teaching. Teaching classes have been visited by over one hundred academics from the UK and Europe; invited lectures, workshops and seminars in twelve UK universities and various conferences.

Dr Stephen Draper

Steve Draper, following a PhD in Artificial Intelligence, worked as a post-doc. with Don Norman where he entered the field of HCI (Human Computer Interaction), and co-authored the book "User Centered System Design". HCI interests include evaluation methods, and the Minimalist documentation technique. He is currently at the University of Glasgow, where in recent years he has worked on evaluation of applications of learning technology, and developed the method of "Integrative Evaluation" in the context of a university-wide initiative. A later project concerned teaching collaborations between universities. This educational evaluation work has also given him an interest in theories of learning and teaching in higher education, and in particular with Laurillard's framework. His main theoretical interest is in how to relate and eventually synthesize the isolated contributions of key theories, including work on reflection, and Perry's ideas on what is now called critical thinking. The practical teaching innovations he has recently been concerned with include the use of interactive voting systems in lectures, setting up a Peer Assisted Learning scheme, and methods for reducing student dropout rates. Much of what he has written in these areas is available on his web site at http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/.