Marcus Winter

My research explores human-computer interaction and applied artificial intelligence in the contexts of education, cultural heritage and public engagement. I am interested in issues around awareness, engagement and agency in the adoption of new technologies. Much of my recent work has focused on AI-enhanced visitor engagement and informal learning in museums. Here are some of my past and current projects.

I lead a number of undergraduate and postgraduate computing modules, which are reviewed and updated every year to ensure they reflect best practice and keep up with ongoing technical developments in the industry.

Drawing on Papert's [5] constructionism, a constructivist learning approach shown to be particularly effective for computing subjects [4], my teaching has a strong emphasis on practical lab sessions, where students actively develop their knowledge and skills by writing and debugging code, sharing their knowledge with each other, and learning from mistakes as they go along. This is reflected in assessment tasks, which use Biggs’ [1] idea of constructive alignment and involve coursework where students apply their learning to concrete problems.

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.}

I supervise research students exploring human-computer interaction and applied artificial intelligence topics in education, cultural heritage and public engagement.

I am particularly interested in research-through-design ^[1] projects generating new knowledge through the iterative, user-centred development and evaluation of design prototypes.

For past work and specific research interests please refer to my project pages. 

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^{[1] Stappers, P. J., & Giaccardi, E. (2017). Research through design. In The encyclopedia of human-computer interaction (pp. 1-94). The Interaction Design Foundation.}