Professor Thomas M Connolly
Thomas Connolly is a Professor in the School of Computing at the University of Paisley, having managed the Department of Computing and Information Systems for several years. Thomas worked for over 15 years in industry as a Manager and Technical Director in international software houses before entering academia. His specialisms are games-based learning, online learning and database systems. He has developed three fully online MSc programmes and developed and leads the undergraduate BSc Computer Games Technology programme. He is co-author of the highly successful academic textbooks Database Systems (now in its 4^th edition) and Database Solutions (in its 2^nd edition). He is a reviewer for several international journals and has been on the committee for various international conferences. He is a member of CPHC (Council of Professors and Heads of Computing) and member of the Higher Education Academy.

Thomas Connolly

Dr Mark Stansfield
Dr Mark Stansfield is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computing at the University of Paisley. He has a PhD in Information Systems and has written and co-written more than 70 refereed papers in areas relating to e-Learning, games-based e-Learning, information systems and e-Business. Journals in which papers have been published include the European Journal of Information Systems, Systems Practice and Action Research, the Journal of Further and Higher Education, the Journal of Electronic Commerce Research, the Journal of IT Education, and Computers and Education. Mark also serves on the editorial boards of several international journals that include the International Journal of Information Management, Journal of Information Systems Education, ALT-J and the Journal of IT Education. Mark was appointed Member of the International Association of Science and Technology for Development (IASTED) Technical Committee on Education for the term 2005-2008 and is a Registered Practitioner of the Higher Education Academy in the UK. He has presented papers at international conferences for over 15 years and has won Best Paper Awards at a number of conferences that include the UK Systems Society Conference in 1993 and the Informing Science and IT Education Conferences in 2003 and 2006.

Mark Stansfield

Dr Kurt Squire
Kurt Squire is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Educational Communications and Technology division of Curriculum and Instruction. He is a former Montessori and primary school teacher and, before coming to Wisconsin, was Research Manager of the Games-to-Teach Project at MIT and Co-Director of the Education Arcade. Squire earned his doctorate in Instructional Systems Technology from Indiana University; his dissertation research examined students' learning through a game-based learning program he designed around Civilization III. Squire co-founded Joystick101.org with Jon Goodwin and currently writes a monthly column with Henry Jenkins for Computer Games magazine. In addition to writing over 30 scholarly articles and book chapters, and he has given dozens of talks and invited addresses in North America, Europe, and Asia. Squire's current research interests center on the impact of contemporary gaming practices on learning, schooling and society. Along with several other University Wisconsin-Madison faculty, he runs the Games and Professional Practice Simulations (GAPPS) initiative located at the Academic Advanced Distributed Learning Co-Lab.

Dr Constance Steinkuehler
Constance Steinkuehler is an Assistant Professor in the Educational Communication & Technology program in the Curriculum & Instruction department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research is on cognition, learning and literacy in massively multiplayer online games (MMOs). Current interests include “pop cosmopolitanism” in online worlds and the intellectual practices that underwrite such a disposition, including informal scientific reasoning, collaborative problem solving, media literacy (as production, not just consumption), computational literacy, and the social learning mechanisms that support the development of such expertise (e.g., reciprocal apprenticeship, collective intelligence).

Constance Steinkuehler

Professor Bob Stone

Bob Stone holds a Chair in Interactive Multimedia Systems at the University of Birmingham, UK, where he is the Director of the Human Interface Technologies Team.  He also currently holds the position of Royal Academy of Engineering Visiting Professor in Integrated Systems Design at the University of Plymouth.  In 1996, he became an Academician of the Russian International Higher Education Academy of Sciences (Moscow).  Bob’s ergonomics career has taken him from human factors research in defence and offshore applications, through a period of developing telepresence interfaces as part of the UK’s National Advanced Robotics Research Initiative in the 1980s, to the world’s first industrial Virtual Reality development programme in the 1990s.  He is currently involved in researching the human factors aspects of interactive 3D and serious gaming, with regular contributions to projects in the fields of defence, surgery/healthcare and cultural heritage. Bob is also the Research Director of the UK’s Defence Technology Centre for Human Factors Integration.

Bob Stone