Formerly Senior Research Fellow in the Departments of Pathology and the Department of Poultry Vaccines at the Central Veterinary Laboratory in Surrey; Chemistry Teacher at The Gordon Boys School in Surrey; Lecturer in Human Anatomy, in the University of Leeds School of Medicine; Director of the Information Modelling Programme at the University of Leeds; Hon. Lecturer in Applied Cognitive Science in the Department of Psychology at the University of Hull; Lecturer in Information Systems in the University of Leeds School of Geography.
In 1985, I switched my research activity from Neuromuscular Disorders to IT applied to the Education and the Development of Computer-Based Information Modelling Tools.
While in the Human Anatomy Department in the Medical School, I designed and developed a series of concept demonstrators and prototype computer-based information modelling tools and applications with support from IBM UK Education, the IBM UK New Technologies Multimedia Initiative, and Sun Microsystems Distributed Hypermedia Initiative. As Director of the Information Modelling Programme at the University of Leeds, I worked with experts, teachers, students and network technicians from a variety of academic domains and the university campus network (in the prototyping and testing of computer-based information modelling tools and applications with a community of users) including Textiles, English (Victorian Periodicals), Pharmacology, Vascular Surgery, Clinical Psychiatry, Applied Agricultural Research and Environmental Science.
As an academic in the University of Leeds, I became focused on the prototyping and testing of computer-based information modelling tools and applications with a community of users: applications in the education (teaching and learning) domain and in the generic software design, engineering and evaluation of computing on the network, employing the technologies of UNIX/X11 Windows, TCP-IP, (for open systems platform independent applications), games programming (for visual interactive and positively cognitively stimulating interfaces and discovery learning), and object-oriented software design, programming and coding for correct software engineering, clarity and re-usability.
My focus and priority was the exploration and practical prototyping and demonstration of a vision of “computer-based hypermedia”. “Walking the Talk” – pursuing the funding necessary to sustain the IMP Initiative and (unconventionally and outside the conventional academic domain) the employment of the games programmer and his side-kick screen artist, and from time to time writing about the development and testing of the tools and applications and during the mid-1990s showing what was in fact the pioneering work at a series of TOOLS (the Technology of Object-Oriented Languages and Systems) Conferences in Europe and the USA.
The vision of “computer-based graphical organisers and browsable schemata” (for systems and domains) which I demonstrated in the ‘HNS Browser’ in 1987 – was met with considerable circumspection by the computer scientists at Leeds (‘the technology for the vision of high-resolution colour graphics and interactive hypermedia doesn’t exist; nobody would want it”), considerable interest by psychologists Noel Sheehy and Tony Chapman at Leeds (“this is a clear demonstration of Paivio’s Dual Coding Theory”; this work is in the domain of cognitive science); and by IBM Education.
The subsequent work – based on vision and theory – was applied R&D* and was inter-disciplinary, falling between the cracks of formal academic domains including computing science, psychology, and education, and the industries of games programming and the newly developing computer-based multimedia. It was rather novel and very tough.
* Applied R&D c.f. Basic Academic Research; Industrial Development; “Walking the Talk”, developing, testing, evaluating and, beyond writing academic papers (c.f. “publish or perish”) – making tangible artefacts: making, testing, evaluating and evolving better prototypes.
See Dr Peter Ward CV:
See: Shorlist of Publications in IT/R&D Software Design, Tools & Application Development and Delivery
https://magicbrowser.co.uk/psw-publications/
See: The GPE Project with IBM UK New Technologies Group, 1989/90
https://slx-online.biz/hursley/hursley-products-sw.asp
See: Book, January 2025 Brandspire Publishing Ltd
“’Frameworks’: Making Sense of It All in The Age of Big Information; A Simple Methodology for Structured Thinking”
