Stephen A Taylor
Born: 26th December 1951. Coatbridge, Lanarkshire, Scotland
Upon completion of his postsecondary education in Coatbridge, Stephen studied fine arts while managing Crest Ceramics a commercial pottery studio in Coatbridge. Later, he moved on to complete a five-year apprenticeship as a furrier with Karter Furs, The Ronson Fur Co. and Lynch Furs in Glasgow, Scotland.
In 1973, Stephen immigrated to Carbonear, Newfoundland, Canada in order to train employees of The Newfoundland Leather Fur and Hide Company in manufacturing techniques. One year later he opened a fur and leather business, ‘Taylor Furs’, with his brother Frank in Torbay, Newfoundland, and within two years they expanded the business, moving to Duckworth Street in St. John’s Newfoundland. After five years Taylor Furs ended operations and Frank went on to start the 'Rob Roy Pub'. Stephen created his own Fur Fashion House (Atlantic Furs Ltd,) in Atlantic Place on Water Street. A few years later he then opened a fine arts gallery (Atlantic Arts Ltd.) in the Murray Premises, St. John's, where he handled works by Gerald Squires, Stuart Montgomery, Ann Meredith Barry, Ron Bolt, Jon Wilkinson and other outstanding artists. At this time he was commissioned by the Government of Canada to design and manufacture a line of fashion garments for a permanent display in Ottawa. These designs were shown in the Hong Kong and Montreal International Fur Shows. Around that time he attended a number of international leather shows in North America and Italy.
Stephen moved to Fredericton, New Brunswick in 1998, and was successful in securing major industry support and donations to the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design, including NedGraphics Fashion Studio and Lectra’s U4ia textile software. In 2003 he graduated with Bachelor of Adult Education, and in 2005 he was the first graduate of a new Master of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of New Brunswick. In 2007 he developed the University of Sussex graduate portfolio application, ‘Profolio’, which, in 2008 was shortlisted for a Times Higher Education Award. This experience guided Stephen to his present research in alternate methods of recording e-portfolios for lifelong learning using stand-alone applications, Virtual Learning Environments (VLE’s) and Web 2.0 technologies.
His current area of research is in e-portfolios. Working with Duncan Mackrill from the University of Sussex, Stephen has designed a set of portable applications that run from a menu application based on John T. Haller’s Portable Apps. The first of a series of papers on this project was presented at the University of Wolverhampton in 2008, at the ‘Telling e-Portfolio Stories Conference’, and a group at the University of Stirling is independently researching the application. Stephen and Duncan presented a paper entitled “‘FlashPort the next generation in e-Portfolios?’ the use of portable applications as e-Portfolio tools in Teacher Education", at the EISTA conference in Florida, June of 2008 where it was awarded best presentation and best paper. His book 'Advances in the Study of Italian Renaissance Silk Velvet' illustrates how a digital collection of textile images in a virtual museum setting could be used as a tool for classroom and online course delivery in crafts, textile design and museum studies.
Books
Advances in the Study of Italian Renaissance Silk Velvet 1