Lectures and course materials for some of my modules offered at the University of Essex are here.
Two modules that I particularly enjoyed teaching each covered an eclectic range of topics, attempting to draw out key underlying themes.
A unique course that drilled down deep and offered a genuinely multidisciplinary perspective. Its exploration of transit maps encountered art, design, architecture, politics, economics, computer science, psychology and usability testing. Together, this gave the history and context of transit maps, their effectiveness from the
point of view of a psychologist, and how to evaluate their success.
This module explored human, machine and animal intelligence, looking at key issues across domains. Not necessarily map related, nonetheless
it is possible to draw intricate attractive state-space maps for some puzzles. The age-old questions of whether the human mind and a digital computer might be equivalent in any way, and also how and why human and animal minds differ, are endlessly fascinating.
For my introductory and intermediate teaching, I tried to smuggle in references to maps whenever I could.
I used to teach two lectures on the Year I Applied Psychology module. The first gave an overview of ergonomics/human-machine interaction and information design. The second looked at transit maps as an example of how psychology theories and methods can improve design, and also highlighted potential pitfalls in usability testing.
I taught three topics on the Year II Personality & Individual Differences module. These gave an overview of the basics of psychometric testing, research into the structure of intelligence, the utility of intelligence test scores as predictors of educational and occupational outcomes, and a searching dissection of arguments that the construct of intelligence is suspect and that the validity of intelligence tests is questionable. The attempts to identify the structure of human intelligence and ability can very much be thought of as mapping the mind.
On the surface, an introduction to Analysis of Variance might not be obviously related to maps. However, design principles should always be evidence-based and this entails usability testing of different maps. Statistical analysis is an essential component of this.