Head of Group in Learning Societies Lab
Professor Hugh Davis has been a yacht designer, a social worker and a school teacher and is now interested in developing technology to improve learning environments.
Now Head of the University of Southampton's new Learning Societies Lab (LSL), Hugh is responsible for developing e-learning across the University.
Hugh had always enjoyed teaching and after completing a degree in Ship Science at the University in 1981, he decided that teaching held better career prospects than shipbuilding.
It was while teaching mathematics and physics at Bembridge School in the Isle of Wight that he was first introduced to computers.
'People were sitting around this big black box wondering what it was,' he said.
Hugh soon became acquainted with the computer and during his second teaching job when he was Head of Computer Studies at Cranleigh School in Surrey, the school funded his Masters degree in Computer Science.
In 1987, after Hugh had completed his Masters degree, the University's Department of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) had been formed and it had advertised for computer science experts. Hugh applied and was awarded a teaching fellowship.
'This also meant that I had to work out how to do research,' he said. 'At the time, I didn't really understand the idea of universities doing research,' he said. 'As far as I was concerned, universities were places where lecturers teach.'
Despite his initial reservations, Hugh is very proud of his research achievements, particularly his work on developing Hypertext with Professor Wendy Hall.
Hugh and Wendy initially got involved in using video discs to do interactive teaching. This led to research into further interfaces and the development of a system which enabled hypertext links to be stored in a database outside a document. This open hypermedia system was known as Microcosm and was commercially exploited through Multicosm Ltd of which Hugh was a founding director. The Microcosm software was an ITEA'95 award winner and a BCS IT award winner in 1996. The company is now called Active Navigation Ltd, and focuses on Web-based link services.
Hugh spent over 10 years working at the leading edge of hypertext research before returning to his first research area of learning technology.
In 2003, he became Head of the Learning Technologies Research Group within ECS, which has just been renamed the Learning Societies Lab.
For Hugh, the name change signifies the group's increasing focus on leading-edge research.
'We have always been a research group and we felt that our old name gave the impression that we just provided computing technical services,' he said. 'We therefore decided to reinvent ourselves as a leading research group at the cutting edge of technology-enhanced learning.'
Hugh is very dedicated to finding ways to help students to engage more effectively with the learning process.
'I look for ways to get them to think for themselves so that they become autonomous university students and go on learning afterwards,' he said.
Geography students have been engaging with on-line teaching activities which use live data sources, such as census data, to solve authentic problems using state of the art computing tools. This work was undertaken in a collaboration with universities in the WUN network, and sponsored by NSF and JISC.
Hugh and his team have also developed a programme which allows ad hoc group formation based on students' experience and interests.
'Rather than trying to randomly sort students into groups based on where they happen to be sitting or on what they are studying, we can ask a programme to organise these groups ahead of time and provide a more interesting experience for the students,' said Hugh.
Another project is a web-based revision aid for students which provides them with suitable questions to facilitate their revision and then in an Amazon-like fashion, allows them to access questions which other students who did this revision also tackled.
LSL is also developing mobile technology to enable more efficient mentoring of student nurses.
'At the moment, at the end of each day, a student nurse has to ask a staff nurse to sit down with them to assess progress,' said Hugh. 'This can be a time-consuming process which can often get overlooked during busy periods.
‘A mobile screen which could be ticked throughout the day could be a viable alternative to this process.'
Hugh's success in this field was acknowledged in 2005 when he was appointed Director of Education in the University. He is keen to build on his successes to meet new challenges.
'I want to continue to work with multidisciplinary groups of psychologists, sociologists and educationalists to solve problems in a much rounder way,' he said. 'This means working with these groups to solve real problems and to provide new solutions to old ones.'
