Professor Colin Turner. (Photo: Nigel McDowell/Ulster University)

Welcome to my personal blog. If you are mainly interested in my professional information, my LinkedIn page may be more up-to-date. This blog doesn't represent the position or opinions of any of my employers or other entities I work with unless stated otherwise.

I am an Engineer, Mathematician and Software Architect from Northern Ireland. I am currently Executive Dean for the Faculty of Computing, Engineering and the Built Environment and Professor of Engineering Education at Ulster University, having served eight years as Head of School for Engineering. I am also a former President of the Engineering Professors' Council, which seeks to support and represent Engineering Academics across the UK.

Learning and Teaching

I am a National Teaching Fellow and a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. My teaching specialisms are in the areas of Engineering Mathematics and Software Development. I have designed and developed a number of award winning IT systems for learning support in Higher Education. Where possible I make these systems available as Free and Open Source Software. so others can use or improve upon this work freely. I often write articles about these systems on this blog. Some of these articles are about technical implementation, while others focus on pedagogical aspects of my work. You might explore the higher education tag here for more.

Please get in touch at c.turner@ulster.ac.uk if you interested in these systems - which are available as a service if required.

I am a strong advocate for working with students as partners, such as I do with our inspiration and award winning student led society USSE.

Research and Development

I have significant experience in industrial projects in software development, often focused on helping companies with a specific project and helping them make their processes more robust and efficient.

My research work has taken me into areas such as Topology and Semi-conductor testing but the bulk of my work has been in mathematical and statistical work in engineering approaches to cardio-vascular medicine.

Other Experience

I have experience in professional journalism, Keynote Speaking, External Examining, External Educational Consultancy, Subject Specialist Consultancy, including Expert Witness work. If you need to get in touch with me about any of the above, please email me at c.turner@ulster.ac.uk.

More About Me

I have a keen interest in martial arts, and have studied aikido since 1999 and taught it since 2001. I also study iaido, since 2000. I teach it much more infrequently. There are quite a few of my blog posts on these topics.

Computing is a major hobby as well as work, over the years I have played with all sorts of computers and programming languages. You can find a lot of the source code I have written over

I used to run quite a big BBS but it's down at the moment, largely due to an astonishingly irritating run of bad luck with computer equipment since I moved. It's still my intention to put it up and running again, but I need a lot of time to essentially rebuild it from scratch, which is hard to find at the moment. I used to spend a lot of time developing comms software with Chris McCandless mainly, but also with many others including the folks at Definite Solutions. I find it quite difficult to maintain an effort writing software on my own. It gets rather dull, so I'm not getting much of that done at the moment either. We wrote under the name of Piglet Productions and we released most of the code at foss @ ulster .

For about a year I wrote a series of articles on Fidonet and its technology and BBSs for the magazine Internet & Comms Today (Now Internet Today), and wrote other InterNet related articles for NetUser, How To Get Online and NetDirectory. I was elected to the FTSC (Fidonet Technical Standards Committee) for a time, which attempts to document current technical practice in Fidonet as a service to developers. In the end I was elected to chair the FTSC, but I think I found that as difficult and frustrating as my predecessors, when it is almost impossible to get spare time at the same time as enough members to make real progress.

Personal links

Here are some personal links to my pages on other sites.

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