Dr Dick Bacon
About
Biography
Joined the university in 1977, working first in musical acoustics, then with medical ultrasonics and later in the setting up of a new undergraduate course in Physics with Microcomputing.
Appointed a lecturer in 1985, with research interests in image reconstruction and processing (including the automatic recognition of musical scores for the music publishing industry) and later in parallel processing.
Started the SToMP project 1992 (Software Teaching of Modular Physics) with funding from the Higher Education Funding Councils.
Publications
Microcosm was an open hypertext system that evolved in the early 1990s, before the advent of the Web. Apart from its success as a research platform it was widely used for presenting interactive educational materials. Since the commercial version of the product ceased to be supported it became necessary for users to migrate their educational materials, generally to the Web. However, the SToMP consortium chose to implement their own environment copying parts of the functionality of Microcosm in order to achieve their educational objectives. This paper examines the motivations of this work in order to understand whether there were features that were available in Microcosm that were not replicated in current Web based solutions.
The Physics CTI Centre's role is to encourage the use of software in undergraduate teaching. High quality software is now available that offers generalized tools as well as content-based material. A new initiative offers more integrated support for teaching.