John Maxwell

John has been working on the Web since 1993. Since then, he’s been working on content management strategies, electronic publishing, SGML & XML, learning technologies, virtual communities, and reflecting on the history of all that. John was a member of the first Master of Publishing cohort at SFU in 1995/96. He’s worked with Canadian book and magazine publishers on digital strategies looking forward, and also on the history of tech innovations in publishing.

After working on educational technology at the BC’s Open Learning Agency through the late 1990s, he did a PhD in Curriculum & Instruction at the University of British Columbia where his research focused on the cultural history of personal and educational computing at Xerox PARC in the 1970s.

John has taught in the Publishing Program at SFU since 2001, and became the Director of the program in 2014. He teaches the MPub seminar PUB 802 – Technology & Evolving Forms of Publishing.

John’s current research involves the evolution of scholarly communications, open scholarship, the digitization of SFU Library’s 16th century Aldine Collection, and historical research on digital tech. John publishes the open-access journal Pop! Public. Open. Participatory. He usually teaches a course on “Text Processing Techniques & Traditions” at DHSI each June.

John is almost a BC native (he was born east of the Rockies but has lived on the coast most of his life). He’s married with a couple of big kids, 2¾ cats, and a very large puppy.