About

Thanks for checking out my blog. It’s a place where I think out loud about the intersection of two of my greatest passions: teaching and technology. As well, there’s a mix of videos and pictures found on the web, excerpts from my fiction writings and book reviews - all the kinds of things that I think we’ll need to use in an online learning environment. Why not start now by using them here?

Over the years I’ve learned a lot by bumming around the world as well as going to various schools. I grew up in Aylmer, a small town in Québec, near Ottawa. As a teenager I was very good with numbers and worked for Statistics Canada (then called the Dominion Bureau of Statistics) but I dropped out of university on my first pass and travelled all over Canada, US and Mexico. In 1974, I went back to Carleton University to study Canadian History because I realized I knew absolutely nothing about Canada. In grad school, I shifted to Canadian film and was lucky to study with Peter Harcourt. With John Sharkey, I set up the Canadian Film Group to promote Canadian film; our greatest successes were probably the after-film parties.

I was fascinated by the possibility of using computers to make films and in 1982 I started Alias Research, with Susan McKenna Grant, Dave Springer and Nigel McGrath. Alias became one of the key companies in the development of animation software used by Pixar and other filmmakers. At Alias, brilliant young grads from the University of Toronto and Waterloo built the world’s best 3D modeller and that led to sales, not only in animation, but in the automotive industry and, later, in the production of computer games. We took Alias public in 1990 and in 1992 I left.

Over the next ten years I resumed my travelling and also produced a TV pilot for CBS called Spillville, set up a graphics company with my brother John, helped found Voyo, an email software venture and wrote a (still unpublished) novel and flock of short stories. All along the way, I taught English to friends I had met in Asia and their kids as well as friends of friends. So, in 2006, I went to the University of Toronto to get my Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) certificate. My plans are to help in the development of a new type of language teaching that uses technology. And that’s what I’m doing here!

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