Marcus Winter

My research explores ubiquitous computing and machine learning applications in the contexts of education, cultural heritage and public engagement. Taking a human-computer interaction perspective, I investigate issues around awareness, engagement, agency and digital inclusion in ubiquitous computing environments.

I am interested in supervising postgraduate research students in ubiquitous computing, human-computer interaction and applied machine learning in the contexts of education, cultural heritage and public engagement.

University drop-out. Programmer. Entrepreneur. Joining the University of Brighton brought me full circle in a meandering career path that saw me developing cryptographic services for a national bank, setting up my own software company, creating vector graphics authoring tools and running an online animation platform. Connecting these dots is a keen interest in human computer interaction and research, leading me back to university and a degree in Learning, Technology, Research from Anglia Ruskin University in 2008.

I started at the University of Brighton in 2008, working on a string of research projects including Augmented Reality in School Environments (EU Framework Programme 6), Authoring Games on the Go (Technology Strategy Board), CloudBank (Joint Information Systems Committee) and Situated Mobile Language Learning (EU Lifelong Learning Programme).

In 2013 I became a permanent member of staff in the School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics (CEM) and principal investigator in the 10 Most Wanted project (Digital R&D Fund for the Arts). At that time I was already two years into a part-time research programme exploring social object labels in museums to encourage visitor engagement and social interpretation, for which I was awarded a PhD in 2017.

Since then I have led research in Backyard Brighton (Community University Partnership Programme) and Archives Alive (Heritage Lottery Fund), both exploring locative media as a way to surface archive materials and engage new audiences with local history. My most recent research investigates how emerging AI technologies can enhance visitor engagement and learning in museums.

My teaching remit includes leading a range of undergraduate and postgraduate computing modules, as well as supervising postgraduate and PhD research students in areas relevant to my research.

I have developed and redesigned a range of undergraduate and postgraduate modules on mobile and web development to ensure our computing curriculum reflects best practice and keeps up with ongoing technical development in the industry. Drawing on Papert's ^[5] constructionism, a constructivist learning approach shown to be particularly effective in computing ^[4], these modules have a strong emphasis on students actively developing their knowledge and skills by writing and debugging code, and learning from their mistakes as they go along. This is also reflected in my assessments, which use Biggs’ ^[1] idea of constructive alignment and involve coursework where students apply their learning to concrete problems.

As an advocate of research-informed teaching ^[2,3], I make students aware of on-going research related to subjects, illustrate theoretical concepts with practical examples from my own prototype development, and actively involve students in the design, development and evaluation of research prototypes.

I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy since 2019 and keep up-to-date with developments in my field by tapping into relevant channels, playing an active part in the developer community, engaging with industry professionals and taking part in academic conferences. 

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[1] Biggs, J. (1996). Enhancing teaching through constructive alignment. Higher education, 32(3), pp.347-364.

[2] Griffiths, R. (2004). Knowledge production and the research teaching nexus: The case of the built environment disciplines. Studies in Higher Education, 29(6), pp. 709–726.

[3] Healey, M. (2005). Linking research and teaching: Exploring disciplinary spaces and the role of inquiry-based learning. In Barnett, R. (ed.) Reshaping the university: New relationships between research, scholarship and teaching. McGraw-Hill Education (UK).pp. 67-78.

[4] Kafai, Y. B. and Resnick, M. (1996). Constructionism in practice: Designing, thinking, and learning in a digital world. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates

[5] Papert, S. (1991). Situating Constructionism. In Papert, S. and Harel, I. (Eds) Constructionism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.