Jill Foster was originally a physicist with a first degree in
Physics, an MSc. in Solid state Physics and a postgraduate certificate
in education. She enjoyed teaching young adults for 5 years,
as the head of a Physics department in a traditional grammar
school. She then changed career by taking an MSc in Computing,
and becoming a network systems programmer in the Computing Service
at the University of Newcastle. She has been based in the Computing
Service for the last nineteen years, becoming involved in user
support and training and founding two major Internet Services
for the UK Higher Education Community. She is now Director of
these services:
Mailbase and Netskills.
She originally set up Mailbase, the UK national Mailing List
Service, 10 years ago out of a desire to encourage the broad
spectrum of academic and research staff to make use of the Internet.
(It had previously been the province of computing scientists
and physicists.) Mailbase discussion lists are now in use by
some 50% of UK academic staff. (There are more than
170,000 users of some 2,500 lists covering a broad range of
academic subjects.)
Helping and encouraging others to use the Internet involved
providing training workshops, and this in turn lead to the highly
successful Netskills project. Netskills, which has been operational
for 4 years, provides quality Internet training and training
materials for the UK higher education community. Over 10,000
staff have been trained already, and are using their skills
to exploit the Internet and Intranet technologies for teaching
and learning, administration, research and support.
Jill has been actively involved in national and international
network groups. She chaired the European TERENA Information
Services and User Support (ISUS) Working Group, the IETF Networked
Information Retrieval Working Group and the Network Training
Materials Working Group, and was author of two Internet RFCs.
She is track leader of Track 3 (Internet
Information Services) of the Internet Society Network Training
Workshops for countries in the early stages of Internetworking.
