I'm married to the eternally wonderful Sue. We have two daughters: Cassie is seventeen and Alex is fourteen. The Photo Gallery will show you what the more photogenic members of the family look like.

I'm a Senior Lecturer in Science Education at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia.

My research interests are in science education, teacher education, narrative and other qualitative research methodologies, philosophy of science, educational technology and web-based teaching and learning.

This page is just a central place that probably contains way more information about me than you ever needed, some recommendations for books to read, a few of my published and unpublished papers, and even my PhD thesis. Hope you find it interesting and useful.

Click here to e-mail me

My first book, Weaving Narrative Nets to Capture Classrooms (based on my PhD thesis, but significantly expanded), was published in January 2004 by Kluwer Academic Publishers. My second, Undead Theories, was published in March 2006 by Sense Publishers.

I usually read an average of 2 or 3 books each week (on the bus, before bed, while waiting for downloads and, er... other places!), and have done for close to 25 years. The vast majority of these are fiction, usually in the fields of science fiction (preferably of the cyberpunk brand, although I read all the 'classics' in my teens), fantasy (same for fantasy as SF - read my Tolkein and Donaldson and so on years ago, enjoy the more gnarly stuff now) and horror (when it's good, it's very, very good, and when it's bad, it's horrid!), and those are the ones I want to talk about here. The rest are in the history and philosophy of science, and come up in the 'Philosophy' section, but when I'm stuck in a boring place without a book, I'll read just about anything, so I've read my share of Cassie's kids books (Harry Potter really is good!) and Sue's romance novels (Johanna Lindsey and Jude Deveraux for preference!), and Reader's Digests and....

Rather than give you links to my favourite novelists, I thought I'd just include a table of their names, major titles and a short blurb, and let you go looking: reading about books is never as good as reading books!

Iain M Banks	Consider Phlebas, Player of Games, Use of Weapons, Look to Windward, Inversions, Dead Air, The Algebraist, Feersum Endjinn, lots more	The Scottish legend: my favourite book of all time, apart from Only Forward, is Use of Weapons - no, it's Look to Windward, no... arrghh: the man is a genius. He also writes non-SF novels that are amazing (and doesn't use the M in his name in those)
Stephen Donaldson	The Chonicles of Thomas Covenant (big series!), Mordant's Need (small series), The Gap series (huge and amazing, if harrowing), Daughter of Regals (short stories), Reave the Just (short stories)	The two short story collections are astonishing - and the novels rule too. The Gap series... I can't write about it - read it!
David Gemmell	Legend, The King Beyond the Gate, the Waylander series, the Jerusalem Man series, Sword In The Storm, Ravenheart, lots more	Characterisation, action and the best (because most complex and nuanced) moral voice in fantasy fiction today. Gemmell's novels are all about faith and fear and courage - amazing.
William Gibson	Burning Chrome (short stories), Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties, The Difference Engine (with Bruce Sterling), Pattern Recognition.	The cyberpunk master just keeps getting better and better.
Neal Stephenson	Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle	No-one else writes as funny, as serious and as mind-blowing as Stephenson. Snow Crash particularly blends mafia pizza delivery with Sumerian mythology and neuro-linguistic theory: a tour de force
Michael Marshall Smith	Only Forward, Spares	'Only Forward' is my favourite novel of all time. Get it, read it - even ask to borrow it from me: just read it! 'Spares' is great too, and his novels under the name 'Michael Marshall' (The Straw Men, The Lonely Dead, Blood of Angels) are wonderful too.
Jack Womack	Ambient, Terraplane, Heathern, Elvissey, Random Acts of Senseless Violence, Let's Put the Future Behind Us...	Plays with language and ideas, and shows us a future we wouldn't want to live in, but that is all too plausible... read him!
Bruce Sterling	The Artificial Kid, Schismatrix, Crystal Express (short stories), Holy Fire, Zeitgeist	The philosopher of the post-human: Sterling tells fascinating stories, and has dealt more interestingly than anyone else I know (in fiction or otherwise) with the effects of technology on humans.
Ed McBain	Far too many to list - this guy is prolific!	Crime fiction, often set in a sort of alternative NewYork. Reliably rivetting. Also wrote the fantastic 'Blackboard Jungle' (some of the best evocations of the experience of teaching anywhere) under his real name, Evan Hunter.
Clive Barker	Cabal, Imajica, Weaveworld, The Great and Secret Show, Gallilee, Sacrament, Coldheart Canyon	The dark master - lots of explicit sex and violence, so not for the fainthearted, but he shows us worlds of wonder and extremity like no-one else.
Stephen King	Again, way too many to list.	OK, he's no secret! But perhaps you haven't realised before what a great story teller he is - and also what a moral heart informs all his work.
Anthony Burgess	A Clockwork Orange, Any Old Iron, The Piano Players, Earthly Powers, the Enderby series, and heaps more.	Very, very versatile of voice and always thoughtful and excellent.

I play a lot of computer games - probably more than I really should if I want to still have enough time with the family... Sue and I like playing role playing games (RPGs) like Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn, Icewind Dale 1& 2, Neverwinter Nights, Fable and others together. We also played older games like Eye of the Beholder and graphical puzzle adventures like Myst and Riven. One person (usually me, though this is sometimes a bone of contention!) does the keyboard and mouse 'driving' while the other one thinks and provides suggestions.

I also enjoy first person shooters (FPSs) like Quake (the first one is my favourite and the series goes downhill from there, in my opinion, although I should play Quake 4 some time I guess), Unreal, Unreal 2, Unreal Tournament, Half-life 1 & 2 and all the various expansion packs and even Daikatana. I usually play these by myself in single player mode, or over the net with friends. Older games like Bioforge are cool too.

Probably my favourite genre, though, is 'first person sneakers' (also FPSs, confusingly!) like the Thief series, System Shock 1 & 2 and Deus Ex 1 & 2. I particularly like the Thief and Deus Ex series because they're not about shooting everything in sight - in fact they have a moral stance against carnage - but about thinking and sneaking and being careful.

The music section used to say 'my tastes are pretty eclectic', but I guess they're really not! I do like the old school hiphop of Run-DMC, Arrested Development, Salt 'n' Pepa and (with somewhat more swearing!) Ice-T, and the 'black metal' (that's a joke, see) of Living Colour. But beyond that, most of what I listen to on a regular basis fits on the continuum of 'white men with guitars'!

Older metal stuff includes Iron Maiden, Metallica, Megadeth and Anthrax. For newer noize, Fear Factory is fun, and I also enjoy Evergrey and Moonspell, but Opeth is my particular favourite at the moment.

On the other end of the spectrum, Peter Gabriel is always amazing, and I've been enjoying the Finn Brothers album and the latest David Gilmour album recently.

Each of the 'major' 20th century philosophers of science (and I know that's a controversial judgement right there!) - Sir Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn - has been quite influential both in how I think about science and in my views on philosophy and life more generally, but the perspectives I find really fascinating and influential are the (somewhat opposed, but less than they'd tell you!) ideas of Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend.

There's a good brief discussion of 20th century philosophy of science here: http://www.philosopher.org.uk/sci.htm, and two of my papers draw on these ideas and apply them to education: Feyerabend Revisited: Epistemological Anarchy and Disciplined Eclecticism in Educational Research and Sketching Some Postmodern Alternatives: Beyond Paradigms and Research Programs as Referents for Science Education.

I also find Jurgen Habermas' early work on 'Knowledge and Human Interests' to be an enormously valuable tool for thinking about different forms of knowledge and their appropriate domains of usefulness.

And last but not least, Max van Manen's work on pedagogy and the tact and thoughtfulness required in teaching has been very influential on my thinking about education, and his hermeneutic phenomenological approach to human science research has influenced my research approaches.

These have been placed in approximately reverse chronological order (i.e., newest first).

The Death of Theory in Educational Research
Proceedings of the 2003 Complexity Science and Educational Research Conference, October 16–18 • Edmonton, Canada • pp. 169–185 • http://www.complexityandeducation.ualberta.ca
Me being provocative, I guess. This is an attempt to apply approaches from complexity science to educational research. I tentatively conclude that perhaps 'theory generation' is no longer a useful metaphor for our inquiry into teaching and learning.

Teaching for Understanding and/or Teaching for the Exam in High School Physics
International Journal of Science Education 26(4), 447-462. This one was written with my colleagues Helen Wildy, Bill Louden and John Wallace, and is about our study of physics teaching in Perth.

The Empty Centre: Power/Knowledge, Relationships and the Myth of ‘Student Centred Teaching’ in Teacher Education
Australian Journal of Teacher Education Drawing on journal entries about my own teaching practice, this paper addresses the whole notion of 'teacher centred' and 'student centred' teaching and learning, and suggests that 'the centre' is a spatial metaphor that is not particularly useful in describing complex educational contexts. The paper also describes a number of alternative ways of thinking about these issues.

Feyerabend Revisited: Epistemological Anarchy and Disciplined Eclecticism in Educational Research
Australian Educational Researcher Uses Paul Feyerabend's ideas, as well as those of Popper, Kuhn and Lakatos, to explore the analogies between philosophy of science and educational research.

Writing Our Lived Experience: Beyond the (Pale) Hermeneutic? With Peter Taylor.
Electronic Journal of Science Education, 5(4), June 2001. Discusses and illustrates the use of 'impressionistic tales of the field' in educational research, and standards for judging the quality of qualitative research of this kind.

Sketching Some Postmodern Alternatives: Beyond Paradigms and Research Programs as Referents for Science Education
Electronic Journal of Science Education, 5(1), September 2000. This paper discusses the implications of a number of perspectives related to philosophy of science for the learning of science students in schools. I have attempted to sketch some alternative ways of thinking about what happens in science classrooms.

Weaving Narrative Nets to Capture School Science Classrooms
1997 Research in Science Education. Although this paper has the same title as the one below, it's significantly different, having been through a number of iterations and changes (with tough but productive comments from Ken Tobin) in preparation to be published in the journal Research in Science Education (RISE). For one thing, it now includes three 'impressionistic tales'...

Weaving Narrative Nets to Capture School Science Classrooms
Presented at the conference of the (US) National Association for Research in Science Teaching, March 21-24 1997, Oak Brook Illinois. A similar paper was presented at the conference of the American Educational Research Association, March 24-28 1997, Chicago Illinois. Describes the methodology and some of the results of my doctoral research project, which uses impressionistic tales (stories) to represent the world of an innovative middle school in Perth.

Epistemological Anarchy and The Many Forms of Constructivism
Science & Education, 6(1-2), February 1997. A bit of a philosophic piece which explores the many different epistemological perspectives within the banner of 'constructivism'. I suggest that, rather than becoming a 'fundamentalist convert' to any particular perspective, it's more powerful to heed Paul Feyerabend's liberating maxim 'anything goes'.

For reasons best known to themselves, Kluwer, who publish the journal, won't allow me to post the text of the paper on this web site. You can e-mail me and I'll send it to you, either electronically or by snail mail, or you can find it in the journal.

Teaching as a Moral Activity: Critical Reflections in Teacher Education
Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia, National Conference, Perth, July 1996. This paper was co-written with Peter Taylor and Bev Day. It is a multi-voiced account of a 'critical incident' which occurred in a postgraduate course for teachers in which Peter was the teacher, Bev was a student and I acted as a 'critical friend' for Peter. We suggest that Habermas' 'practical interest' in communicative relationships is an important way of thinking about teaching and learning.

The Empty Centre: Does Student-centred Learning Imply Abdication or Role Redefinition for Educators?
Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia, National Conference, Perth, July 1996. An exploration of the ideas of 'student-centred' learning, and the way this value perspective played itself out in a Masters level course for teachers which I conducted in 1995. I suggest that the metaphor of 'the centre' might not be the most useful way of thinking about these issues. This paper was revised and developed to form the paper for the Australian Journal of Teacher Education that appears elsewhere on this page.

Learning to Communicate: Developing as a Science Teacher
Australian Science Teachers Journal, March 1996. This paper explores my own growth and professional development as a teacher, in terms of two different 'description systems': the critical theory of Jurgen Habermas and several forms of constructivism.

Matrix Technique: A Constructivist Approach To Curriculum Development in Science
Australian Science Teachers Journal, September 1995. Describes an innovative approch to curriculum development which I used in my MEd research. It attempts to take seriously the implications of constructivist approaches to student learning, and for this reason specifies only the experiences which students will share, not the knowledge to be learned.