Welcome!

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Simon Buckingham Shum

Professor of Learning Informatics
University of Technology Sydney
Director, Connected Intelligence Centre

Welcome to my site! I have a career-long fascination with how computers help to make thinking visible in new ways. You’ll find on this site details of how my team has over the years invented a range of digital tools designed to combine human and machine intelligence, typically released open source.

My current focus is on the future of education, specifically, the contribution of human-centred design of Analytics/AI-powered tools to close the feedback loop to learners and educators, to build the capabilities needed for the future of work and citizenship. “Human-centred” requires pedagogy, design and ethics in deep dialogue with data science and systems thinking. For more on the path I’ve walked to get to this point, see my interests.

I share news and pre-publication thoughts on this blog and Medium. I’m a co-founder of the Society for Learning Analytics Research, and a Fellow of the RSA.


In more detail…

Partnerships and sectors: I’ve diverse interests, working with a wide range of organisations, all seeking new forms of sensemaking support to tackle wicked problems… analysing best practices in international development for World Vision; curating good practices for the UK health visitors association; mapping HIV prevention programs for the UN’s International Labour Organization; supporting non-violent hostage recovery options for US Joint Forces Command; adding sensemaking tools for the Hewlett Foundation’s open educational resource initiatives; piloting an open peer review journal for BP drilling engineers; science sensemaking support for NASA’s human mission to Mars program.

Academic background: I bring a human-centred computing perspective to technology. This started with a degree in Psychology (York, 1984-87), where I got interested in the emerging field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) thanks to Andrew Monk. Hooked on HCI, this was followed by a Masters in Ergonomics (UCL, 1988) under John Long, plus a dissertation with Phil Barnard developing an expert system for cognitive modelling in HCI, before returning to York for a PhD 1988-91 in HCI and Design Rationale (supervised by Nick Hammond, and Allan MacLean at Rank Xerox EuroPARC).

Invited talks and consulting: I enjoy communicating with diverse audiences [Talks/Media], and do occasional consulting in my ‘spare time’.

Elsewhere… I’m a lifelong learner husband to Jackie, and dad to Tom, Jas and Jo. I was a moderate tennis player and university darts champion many moons ago, and I still play a drumkit and cajon from time to time. When I lived in the UK, since my 20s I was an annual pilgrim to Greenbelt Festival and I’m now part of Spiritual Misfits. The way to my heart is very simple: Thai and Tiramisu.


I switched to WordPress in July 2008. 1996-2007 news stories are on my original news site.





2nd Int. Conf. Learning Analytics & Knowledge
2nd Int. Conf. on the Pragmatic Web

5 Responses to “Welcome!”

  1. […] Simon Buckingham Shum is a Senior Lecturer in the OUs Knowledge Media Institute, was previously the director for the OUs ambitious SocialLearn project and is currently working on trying to build collective intelligence systems around the ‘open education resources’ movement. […]

  2. […] Simon Buckingham Shum provided mutually overlapping categories for the workshop […]

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  4. […] very excellent Simon Buckingham Shum is convening a panel on educational data science at the LAK 2013 conference in Leuven and I’m […]

  5. […] Simon Buckingham Shum – Professor of Learning Informatics, Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, Milton […]