John W. Maxwell

email: jmax (at) sfu.ca
twitter: @jmaxsfu

Assistant Professor,
Master of Publishing Program,
Simon Fraser University

John’s research & teaching focus is on the impact of digital technologies in the cultural sector (and particularly books and magazines), the history of digital media, and the emergence of digital genres and mythologies.

John has been working in the Internet and new media since the early 1990s. His professional background includes web development, content management, electronic publishing, SGML & XML, learning technologies, and virtual communities. John was a member of the first Master of Publishing cohort at SFU in 1995/96.

After working on educational technology at the BC’s Open Learning Agency  through the late 1990s, he completed a PhD in Education 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 digital media to publishing students at SFU since 2001. He leads the two tech-oriented courses in the Master of Publishing program (PUB802 and PUB607), an undergraduate seminar on the future of the book (PUB401), and directs Digital Strategy workshops for the SFU Summer Publishing Workshops.

John’s current R&D work includes an emerging set of web-based tools for supporting book & magazine workflows in editorial and production (see http://tkbr.ccsp.sfu.ca/research/xml-production), and historical research on digital innovation at Toronto’s Coach House Press in the 1970s (see http://thinkubator.ccsp.sfu.ca/wikis/chb)

Current CV (May 2011): Maxwell-CVshort0511.pdf

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 kids and more than a couple of cats.