Caroline Haythornthwaite is Professor, School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, the iSchool at The University of British Columbia, where she was Director from 2010 to 2015. She joined UBC in 2010 after 14 years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and 10 years in the computing industry. She has an international reputation in research on e-learning, virtual community, and distributed knowledge from a social network analysis perspective, and the impact of computer media and the Internet on work, learning and social interaction. Current initiatives includes her role as a founding member of the Society for Learning Analytics Research (http: //solaresearch.org/); research on social media and learning supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada; and continued examination of motivations to contribute to open, online initiatives. Major publications include of E-learning Theory and Practice (2011, with Richard Andrews), The SAGE Handbook of E-learning Research (2007, with Richard Andrews), The Internet in Everyday Life (2002, with Barry Wellman), and recent journal special issues on 'New Media, New Literacies, and New Forms of Learning', International Journal of Learning and Media (2014, with Eric Meyers) and Learning Analytics, American Behavioral Scientist (2013, with Maarten de Laat and Shane Dawson). Further information can be found at http: //haythorn.wordpress.com/.
Richard Andrews has held professorial and senior management posts at the University of York, UCL Institute of Education and Anglia Ruskin University. He works across the fields of argumentation, poetics, rhetoric, writing development and e-learning methodologies. He is the co-author with Caroline Haythornthwaite of E-learning Theory and Practice (Sage) and has edited an issue of Learning, Media and Technology on rhetoric in the digital age with Jude Fransman. He is currently working on a prosody of free verse.
Jude Fransman holds a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the Institute of Educational Technology in the Open University. Her dual research interests focus on academic literacies in the 'Digital University' and practitioner engagement with research. She is currently leading a project to explore civil society practitioners' use of digital resources to engage with research (http: //engagingresearch.net ). She also coordinates an ESRC-funded seminar series on the 'politics of evidence' in research partnerships between universities and international NGOs (http: //rethinkingresearchpartnerships.com). She was a previous winner of a Newer Researcher's Award from the Society of Research into Higher Education (SRHE) which supported a study on academic identity in the digital university (http: //www.srhe.ac.uk/research/newer_researchers_reports.asp). She has conducted consultancies for a variety of international organisations and continues to act as a special advisor on literacy for UNESCO.
Eric Meyers is an Assistant Professor at the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies--The iSchool@UBC. His research, at the intersection of information science and the learning sciences, explores how young people engage socially with digital information systems as they work, learn, and play. His recent work has focused on how crafting and prototyping activities in informal learning settings, specifically Maker Camps and library-based coding and crafting programs, support the development of design literacies and computational thinking, the skills and attitudes that facilitate understanding of today′s complex information and communication technologies. He recently edited journal special issues on "Digital Literacies in Informal Contexts" in Learning, Media and Technology (2013, with Ruth Small and Ingrid Erickson) and "New Media, New Literacies, and New Forms of Learning" in International Journal of Learning and Media (2014, with Caroline Haythorthwaite). His research, teaching and service have garnered international awards in the field of Library and Information Science, including the Jesse Shera Award for Distinguished Published Research (2008), the Eugene Garfield Dissertation Prize (2012), and the Pratt-Severn Faculty Innovation Award (2015).
