Acting Assistant General Manager
Department of Education, Employment and Training
Bruce Rigby is Acting Assistant General Manager, Business Systems and Systems Support with the Department of Education, Employment and Training in the State of Victoria, Australia. He is responsible for applications development, on-line content delivery and user support for a State system of 1700 schools.
He previously spent several years as Group Manager of the Learning Technologies in the Curriculum Branch of the same Department where he was responsible for a wide range of projects aimed at improving learning and teaching through the use of information and communication technologies. Major initiatives of the Branch include the SOFWeb schools website, (http://www.sofweb.vic.edu.au), the Navigator Schools Project (http://www.sofweb.vic.edu.au/navschls/), Global Classroom online collaborative projects for students (http://www.sofweb.vic.edu.au/gc/), and the Ideabank Knowledge Exchange for teachers (http://www.sofweb.vic.edu.au/lpol/).
Bruce has also worked in the USA for TERC and the World Bank, collaborated extensively with organisations in Europe on technology education and child safety on the Internet, and provided consultancy and training for countries in Europe and the Middle East.
He has been closely involved with the development of national collaborative projects through Education Network Australia (EdNA). Projects have included development of a National educational metadata standard and working groups on the sharing of intellectual property on line, integration of networked learning resources, and development on on-line educational content. He has been a leader in the development of safe, high quality on-line resources for school students.
Bruce has worked in Australia and overseas as a teacher, scientist, curriculum developer, teacher educator and consultant. IN each role he has been a leader in applying information and telecommunication technologies to solve problems and create new opportunities for business, research and learning.
As the 1993 IBM Winston Churchill Fellow he made a world study tour investigating the use of computer mediated communication for improving educational opportunities and outcomes for school students.
He subsequently worked at TERC in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for 18 months, first as Director of Communications for the Global Laboratory Project and later as a senior research associate on the Testbed for Telecollaboration. While at TERC he was involved with a range of network enhanced and project based science education initiatives as well as teacher enhancement projects involving schools in many parts of the United States and around the world.