Joe was born in central Wisconsin. He received a BA in Mathematics from New College of Florida in 2002, and, in 2014, a PhD from The Open University for his thesis "Peer Produced Peer Learning: A Mathematics Case Study". This work helped spawn a group writing project that is ongoing at peeragogy.org. Now a researcher in the Computational Creativity group at Goldsmiths College, Joe works on the COINVENT project, modeling social aspects of creativity and developing and applying methods for evaluating creative progress.