About us

Facilitators

Norman Jackson

Norman is Managing Director of the Chalk Mountain enterprise and Emeritus Professor at the University of Surrey. Over a distinguished career in higher education he has led significant educational development projects in four different universities and held senior positions with several higher education national bodies - Her Majesty’s Inspectorate, Higher Education Quality Council, Quality Assurance Agency, the Learning and Teaching Support Network (LTSN Generic Centre) and Higher Education Academy.

He is well known as an innovator, public speaker and facilitator in the higher education sector and his research, scholarship and books span the subjects of ‘Benchmarking’ ‘Brokerage’ and ‘Creativity’, 'Learning to be Professional' and 'Lifewide Education'. 

You can find out more about Norman by clicking here

Russ Law

Russ was head of a large British international school for many years, where part of his work was the training of future teachers in a Graduate Certificate programme. Since returning to the UK, where he took a Masters in Education at the Institute of Education, University of London, he has gained further qualifications and experience in leadership development, including accreditation as a coach and mentor. He currently works as an independent consultant and as a trainer/facilitator/assessor and coach in programmes such as Teaching Leaders, Leadership Pathways, and the National Qualification for Headteachers. To date, he has successfully coached more than a hundred individual people for various aims. A former Associate of SCEPTrE at the University of Surrey, he is a keen supporter of those who seek to apply creativity to their own and others’ development.

Patrick Sanders

Patrick is an 'illustrator' and 'event cartoonist'. His pictures have been used not only for publication, but also to document and provide interesting perspectives on presentations in conferences and discussions in workshops. Patrick specialises in a clean, cartoon style, usually black-and- white pen and ink work, but also coloured pencil, paint, pastel and felt-tip. He always works by hand, even on the meticulous shading that characterises his work. His commissions include work for Centre for Excellence in the Creative and Performing Arts at Queens University Belfast, Tinderbox Theatre Company. Higher Education Academy. European University Association. Millward Brown Landsdowne, Rainbow Project. He was artist-in-residence for the Surrey Centre for Excellence in Professional Training and Education at the University of Surrey. With Chalk Mountain he is exploring ways of animating his cartoons.

Researchers

Dr Jenny Willis

Associate

Jenny spent 20 years teaching and managing in the secondary sector, mostly in Inner London. Throughout these years, she led and managed extensive curricular change, and wrote teaching resources for herself and colleagues. In 1995, she moved into teaching and examining for the Open University (London)  whilst completing an interdisciplinary PhD in socio-linguistics. In 2000, she joined the University of Surrey Registry, as a member of the Quality Assurance and Enhancement Office, with responsibility for supporting the Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Learning and Teaching). She gained a SCEPTrE Fellowship in 2008/09 and between  2008-2011 she conducted many investigations into aspects of professional learning using on-line survey tools and interview-based methods.

Technology & Media Team

Chris Stannage

Chris is currently undertaking his final year in Economics with Finance and computing. Prior to university Chris Co-Founded Mike Away Productions Ltd & File-Vault Ltd. Chris is passionate and enthusiastic about technology and is a keen web developer and media editor with over 6 years experience and is Adobe ACA certfified in Flash. Previously worked with Pentacor PLC a well known web design agency in the industry. He has a vast experience in various operating systems and server based platforms and is currently working on a number of Iphone & Symbian applications for mobile devices. 

Edward Sillars

Ed has worked in a variety of different fields as a freelance technician and his love of technology comes from the understanding that the better technology is understood the more creatively and expressively it can be used. Ed has completed professional projects in web design, photography, live and recorded audio and video work. He has worked for George Abbot school as their Performing Art technician and is currently working on a 5 month European tour as an audio technician, photographer and videographer for the Australian band The Wishing Well.

Ieva Bachtiarova

Ieva is a young talented film maker. She is a student at the University of Surrey studying film and media and about to embark on her professional training year. She has worked on numerous filming assignments for the Surrey Centre for Excellence in Professional Training and Education.

Hadi Farnoud

Associate Technical Consultant

Hadi has five years of experience with Drupal and other comonly used content management systems including Joomla and Wordpress just to name a few. 10 years of experience with HTML and CSS.                                                                      
Hadi has finished his Msc degree with 71% GPA .

Full list of Hadi's  CV can be found at his LinkedIn account

George Prassinos

Associate Technical Consultant

George has 15 years experience with computer hardware equipment and network environments. He has experience with windows server operating systems, Mac Servers and with several Linux distributions. He has also worked with live content distribution at a number of different platforms including iPhone and Sybian mobile devices. For the last two years he has also been involved with the development of iPhone apps.

Anna Vartapetiance

Anna is a  full time Research Student in  the Computing Department at the University of Surrey .  Since 2007 she has been working as Virtual  world designer and developer specializing  in Second Life. She joined SCEPTrE in 2008 as  the principal developer of Surrey Island-  the University's Second Life Virtual World presence - which has been used to host many educational events and created opportunities for University of Surrey students to undertake their Dissertation in such environments. In the same year she joined an EU project of MUVEnation related to “Teaching in Multi-User Virtual Environment” and started to work  outside academia to get best use of virtual worlds for education.  Anna (a.k.a Viki Silvansky in Second Life) is currently working as Virtual World Education Consultant and Developer both nationally and internationally.