Alun Salt
If you’re looking for evidence that the division between research and teaching is arbitrary then Alan Cann should be exhibit number one.
The first course of his that I helped out on was Statistics for Biologists. This could easily have been agony. Alan’s approach wasn’t simply to work out what to put in, but also what to leave out. The difference, that I’ve not seen so explicitly by anyone else, is that Alan also quantifies what is working, who engages with tasks, when and how. This results in research papers based on these entry-level courses. This isn’t for the sake of evaluation or course accreditation. It’s from a genuine research curiosity, how do we make this work better?
When I designed a module of the Interdisciplinary Science course the only thing I’d thought about was hitting the bullet points of topic we needed to cover. The next time I take on course design there’ll be a very different approach in evaluating how well the course works. Alan Cann’s work will be a big influence on that.
As well as blogging here, he has his own site at Science of the Invisible, where you can go over to congratulate him.
Nigel Chaffey
Many congratulations to Alan on this terrific honour and achievement – it is very well deserved. It is great that he is associated as Internet Consulting Editor for Annals of Botany. He is responsible for giving well-supported academic leadership to what we are trying to achieve in the web-space: not simply reproducing a paper Journal, but using the power of new media to enhance what we can do, and broaden its accessibility in both audience and physical terms. The Higher Education Academy Senior Fellowship recognizes Alan’s major contribution in using social and new media and introducing its use in the University teaching environment. Of course, the students know much more about these media than the academic staff, and Alun has been showing how social/internet approaches can be used in teaching.