Professor Stephen Heppell is a Senior Consultant with EDI, advising clients on a wide range of education and ICT issues. Stephen’s work extends into multiple but overlapping domains.
In new media and broadcasting, he has been at the forefront of the new-media revolution since the 1980s, guiding organisations from BAFTA and the BBC to Teachers’ TV and the innovative sports channel Cowes.TV. A regular broadcaster himself, he received the Royal Television Society’s Judges’ Award for lifetime contribution to educational broadcasting in 2006.
Stephen pioneered collaborative virtual learning spaces. Past projects range from the Guinness Book of Record’s largest internet learning project in the world (in the last century), through a community of 20,000 headteachers, to the worldwide Think.com. A string of very large-scale projects showed — and still shows — just how seductive online learning communities could be, and he started these in the pre-web days of the 1980s.
In architecture and design, his pioneering research work for CABE and RIBA redefined the scope of learning spaces, largely informed by the emerging pedagogies in his virtual spaces. He is involved in the building or redevelopment of a wide range of learning spaces worldwide — from community and corporate, through to higher education, and a good number of radical, effective, and seductive schools.
Pioneering projects under Stephen’s leadership have consistently reached out for the early adoption of people-power technologies — from Hypercard into learning, through to handheld projects such as the radical eVIVA project with QCA, which used mobile phones to capture learner narrative in a formal viva.
Stephen carries a significant policy portfolio supporting front-running nations worldwide. His work ranges from horizon scanning for the DfES/DCSF through to a full policy revolution in the Caribbean. In addition to his policy consultancy heppell.net ltd, he sits on a small number of corporate boards and is chair of trustees for the charity Inclusion Trust, with its remarkable Notschool.net project. Outside of all this work, Stephen is a passionate sailor, having coached the UK Mirror Class Squad to a World Championship win in Kingston, Canada.