Me with my youngest son, Ciaran.
I’m Brendan. I’m married with two little boys and in my spare time play volleyball at a great little club in the West Midlands.
I was born in the first part of the seventies but I was brought up surrounded by technology – my parents bought their first computer in 1978 and I was using PRESTEL and BBS as a child well before the internet came in to existence. Whilst at school in the late eighties I got in to doing DTP work for a local printer and spent my entire savings on a scanner. I remember being blown away at university when I first encountered Mosaic. A couple of years later when I got my first proper job I ended up building databases and websites and got drawn in to direct marketing (telephone, postal and online – my first banner ad running over Xmas’96). I was working for a very bizarre organisation that did a lot of work in widening participation (WP) but as the WP funding ran out they started running lots of very strange overseas educational projects. Note to self: this is a really poor summary of such a formative and mad period of my life and I must write a post on this at some point.
After this I worked in a job that involved Marketing, Global Networks and Communities for the University that can claim to have invented distance learning some 150 years ago. It’s a university that’s very big and very prestigious but hardly anyone knows anything about it. Note to self: also write a post on this topic at some point.
I now work at the University of Leicester within the Division of Corporate Affairs & Planning.
Feel free to drop me a comment and I’ll probably contact you to say hello. My contact details if you can’t work them out (fawcettbj on most networks) are available via http://scr.im/f.
P.S. Obviously the views expressed here are entirely my own and certainly do not represent those of my previous, current or future employers.
