Welcome to my online portfolio and professional blog. Allow me to tell you just a little about myself:
My name is Joshua Geoffrey Archer, born to JoAnne Michelle Archer and Gale Francis Archer on August 27th, 1972, in Fremont, California. I am elder brother to Brandi Danielle Gomes, born in 1978.
I grew up in Fremont until the age of 18, when I moved to Berkeley and attended UC Berkeley for my undergraduate degree in Philosophy, graduating in the fall of 1994. I moved from Berkeley to Santa Barbara to be with my girlfriend (soon-to-be-wife) Julia, as she finished her Masters degree in Sociology.
In 1996, Julia and I moved back up to the San Francisco Bay Area, settling in San Rafael, in Marin county. In 1997, I began my career as a software engineer and started working for Excite, a search engine portal in the dot-com era. I worked for Excite from 1997 to 2001, and started working at Sonoma State University in 2002, at the Center for Distributed Learning. I stayed with the CDL until 2008, when Julia and I began our own web design company, Archer Web Solutions, which we ran until 2012.
In 2012 I began an educational games and services company, Iocari Games, where I have been running after school and summertime enrichment programs for children between the 4th and 12th grades, and offering consulting services for content development involving role-playing games. In 2014, I was joined by my long-time friend and business partner, Bert Holcomb.
In 2014, I enrolled at Sonoma State University to acquire my masters degree in education, emphasizing in Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, with a focus on Educational Technology. I have been completing my coursework as best as I am able, and now in 2019 I hope to be finishing my Masters of Arts in Education by the Spring of this year.
In 2016, Bert and I created an educational 501(c)3 nonprofit, The Game Academy in order to better serve a wider population of children, who may not be economically positioned to afford our programming, and in order for us to work with other educational and nonprofit institutions towards the mission of promoting social, emotional, academic and personal success through the use of tabletop role-playing games, live-action role-playing games, and all sorts of collaborative storytelling.
As of the end of 2018, we have closed Iocari Games in favor of putting all of our energies towards The Game Academy.
Please use the following contact form to reach me with any concerns or interests.