How has your work evolved over the last year? “There are two sides to my professorial life that have evolved, research and teaching. Teaching is where COVID made us change the way we do things very rapidly. For a person like me, who derives much energy from young people interacting scholastically, it was
Dr. Tim Wilson Associate Professor More about his research https://bit.ly/TheCriptLab Contact Info tim.wilson@schulich.uwo.ca (519) 661-2111 Ext. 81587
draining. There were upsides, I learned how to be a better teacher online, this exercise augmented my teaching toolbox. I'm happy that we're coming back together, but I will not abandon my new methodologies within the digital environment. In research, a group of us in anatomy in Early 2021 wrote a review paper in anatomical sciences education, talking about impacts of COVID on how we teach and how people learn anatomy. It changed the way I looked at teaching in COVID times. In my field, anatomy teaching labs are about touching “stuff,” creating an understanding of how this stuff fits together, and that informs us how it then works in a natural environment. However, during COVID this all screeched to a halt. There are no digital environments that can offer rich haptic feedback, heck, we are still working on the visuals. The latest research in my lab investigates how learners with varying spatial abilities get an advantage in STEM (science, technology, engineering, meds) disciplines. Essentially, we are studying how ‘Olympians’ and ‘couch potatoes’ of spatial ability interact with the environmental “stuff” mentioned earlier. In multimedia we can only take in information with our eyes and ears. Much human understanding of our environment come from what we can touch, that occurs in the anatomy lab. In our experiments, adding haptics to the perceptual mix, we start to break the spatial ability advantage. That points further to the fact that digital environments for learning still have a lot of evolving to do just like we had to do when COVID started.”
Generally, what does your day-to-day look like? “In my other life, I'm a farmer. The seasonal changes push activities accordingly. In a way, my academia life is also seasonal. Most of my teaching is in September - February. My fall is thunderously busy teaching in two faculties, Anatomy and Cell Biology and Dentistry. After the shock of an initial fall burp in activity, then it starts to hit a different pace. It's a complex environment for me, trying to balance things that we do in the department in addition to teaching. Many of us balance the needs of our labs with different services that we offer to the school, like sitting on committees, editing for journals, doing the unseen work. “There is no syllabus for being a professor, this is sometimes one of the challenges we love, because we're curious people who want to dive in and explore or find out what makes stuff work.” 51
