Strange Aeons

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Simon Wells
Simon Wells

Simon Wells is an academic researching Argumentation Theory, Automated Reasoning, Intelligent Agents (IA) and MultiAgent Systems (MAS) all approached through a ludic lens.

He is particularly interested in how these tools can be usefully applied to critical literacy, security, gamification, and complex systems.

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Teaching Time Again

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It is nearly that time again when I have to start teaching. All of my teaching duties are confined to the second semester which means that I am really busy but gives me a large chunk of time in the summer and first semester to get on with some research. This year I have decided to try something a little different with my online teaching presence. More polemic and opinion oriented posts on educational and learning topics will still be posted here but anything relevant to particular modules that I am involved in will be posted on the blogs for those individual modules. Thats right, this year I have split the learning materials away from my personal site and have posted them (or at least am in the process of so doing) to their own individual blogs set up especially.
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I also plan to give editorial accounts to other academics involved in delivering material on these modules so that we can share responsibility for keeping learning materials up to date and publicly available. I also have the outlines of a plan to possibly let students have contributor accounts (registered using their @dundee.ac.uk email addresses) for the blog part so that they can contribute relevant resources that they find. Hopefully this will lead to increased interaction with the students during the module and will provide a useful point of presence for coordinating the modules and ensuring that there is a point of contact outside of normal timetabled contact. Obviously this is as opposed to using blackboard and virtual learning environment offered by the university. I think that this is fine for people who aren't running their own servers, or who don't have the skills to create and maintain this kind of resource but it doesn't work for me. Partly this is because I don't want to be beholden to others for the tools that I use to improve the experience of my own students. I care about the tools that I use and will use the best and most appropriate tools available for my purposes and I definitely don't like being told which tools to use. I also feel that my time is better spent deploying the tools I already know rather than learning to use a new tool which can do most of the same things that I already do. One thing that I particularly like about running my own teaching resources is that they are completely open and can be accessed by anyone, whether they are enrolled on my module, or not, whether they are students at Dundee, or not. This is because I have received complimentary emails from people in the past who have solved problems using the knowledge gained from my lecture slides and materials. That is quite gratifying and I can't think of a good reason why any of the lecture materials that I have put together should be o restricted access. It has also been the case that on occasion I have wanted to investigate a topic that I am not familiar with and have found the lecture materials all locked up in blackboard. Yes I could easily email the module coordinator and get access to the materials by logging in but I think that that is too much of a rigmarole considering there is no good reason to hide the materials away in the first place. So, one week and counting, and I still have to get most of the module materials onto their respective new sites.
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