Simon.BuckinghamShum.net

Inspiration. My work is inspired by the vision and >40 years’ work of pioneer Doug Engelbart: to develop technologies to “augment human intellect” in order to tackle our “collective capability for coping with complex, urgent problems.”

Starting from my PhD on visualising design rationale [pdf], I’ve had a career-long fascination with software’s ability to make thinking visible, and has seen me active in communities spanning Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Hypertext, Design Rationale, Scholarly Publishing, Semantic Web, Computational Argumentation, Educational Technology, Collective Intelligence and Learning Analytics. The challenge of visualizing contested knowledge has produced several books: Visualizing Argumentation, Knowledge Cartography, and Constructing Knowledge Art. Browse via the tag cloud, or do some searches.

My focus for the last decade has been…

Learning Analytics and AI in Education: How do you know if someone is learning from the digital traces they leave behind, and who can do what with that insight? If designed from a human-centred perspective, could data, analytics and AI now enable us to study learning, and close the feedback loops to learners and educators, orders of magnitude more effectively?

In particular, I’m interested in the personal qualities that students, professionals and citizens need to thrive in an age of turbulence and complexity. I’ve been active over the last decade in shaping the field of Learning Analytics, co-founding the Society for Learning Analytics Research and launching the UTS:CIC Learning Analytics PhD Program. I particularly enjoy convening workshops around emergent topics, which have gone on to develop as distinctive sub-strands of the field: Social Learning Analytics, Discourse-Centric Learning Analytics, Dispositional Learning Analytics and Writing Analytics.

Click the learning analytics tag to see the full archive, but…

for some short introductory articles, see • Learning Analytics: On Silver Bullets and White Rabbits (Medium) • On the wise use of AI in education (The Conversation) • Learning Analytics Policy Brief (UNESCO) • Open Learning Analytics (SoLAR White Paper)

for commentaries on the state of the field, see • Embracing Imperfection in Learning Analytics • Critical Data Studies, Abstraction & Learning Analytics • Learning Analytics and AI: Politics, Pedagogy and Practices

for reflections on higher education organisational strategy for innovating applied learning analytics, see Architecting for Learning Analytics: Innovating for Sustainable Impact

Research Publications. See the Open U’s eprint archive Open Research Repository, Google Scholar, ACM Digital Library and ORCID. News and views in my blog and twitter.

You can browse my research projects including the websites (which also serve as a web history of the evolving state of my mediocre HTML!)