As Head of Community Projects, was part of Citzens Connect team in 1998 examining how new technology could help create active citizens in the London Bourough of Lewisham where he helped found both the TaLENT Community Grid for Learning (1999) and Creekside Environmental Education Centre (2000).
As Head of Community Programmes at Becta he worked for the UK Department of Education on online learning between 2000 & 2008 and advised various government departments on e-learning and e-government (DfES, DCMS, Home Office). For DCMS he was also a Culture Online Visioneer and co-chair of the Participatory Media Literacy Working Group at OFCOM. Fred was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts for “creative & innovative work in community learning” in 2004.  As a Visiting Research Fellow at the London Knowledge Lab and a part of the Learner-Generated Contexts group he worked on the Ambient Learning City project (MOSI-ALONG) looking at making Manchester an interactive learning city. He is working on a “development framework” for designing participatory Smart City (forthcoming book chapter on CityZens published by Intellect). This builds on work done on the EU Origin of Spaces project with CoWorking Hubs in Bordeaux, Pula, Lisbon, Bilbao and London.
He is currently part of the Cybersalon Digital Think Tank, chaired by Eva Pascoe, is an approved consultant for JISC and NIACE, and has recently produced work for the British Council, on Vocational e-learning, and the BBC, on open learning.

Metaphors & SocialMedia – new ways of supporting learning across City 2.0

Learning ‘beyond the classroom’ has been a key theme in thinking since Web 2.0 was announced in 2002. The current ‘wiring’ of the urban environment as part of Smart City initiatives allows for new ways to be developed to support ‘beyond the classroom’ learning across a city. Whilst social media and smart phones potentially have key roles to play in making this happen, in what ways can we structure their use meaningfully for both learners and institutions? Perhaps more importantly how might we support new forms of context-responsive learning to happen without the organising metaphors of the classroom and formal education? (!) We will look at some lessons being learnt from Social Tapestries in Brighton in 2001 to Ambient Learning City in Manchester in 2011 to CROS in Bucharest in 2013 to Hybrid City in Bristol in 2015. We will discuss the key roles that might be played by andragogy (collaborative learning) and heutagogy (creative learning).