Welcome
| We are in transition… to an era in which the authority of previously dependable sources of understanding is called increasingly into question, in tandem with societal and global challenges that require new ways of thinking. Correspondingly, hard questions are now being asked about our education system’s fitness for purpose. Our challenge is to create the infrastructures in which life-wide, life-long learners develop the capacities to thrive personally, and as citizens, under unprecedented conditions of uncertainty. The capacity to make sense of complex personal, intellectual and social dilemmas is what we need to foster in our children, graduates, researchers, and employees.
Approach. I engage in R&D initiatives to explore socio-technical responses to these challenges. One aspect of this is learning to read and write networks of ideas, claims and arguments. I call it Hypermedia Discourse. This translates into very applied concerns around the future shape of school and university, sensemaking around wicked problems, and public discourse. Bio. Simon Buckingham Shum is at the UK Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute, where he is Senior Lecturer in Knowledge Media, Associate Director (Technology), and leads the Hypermedia Discourse group. He brings a human-centred computing perspective to the challenge of building analytics, collective intelligence and sensemaking tools, informed by a longstanding interest in discourse modelling and argument visualization. He is Program Co-Chair of LAK12: 2nd International Conference on Learning Analytics, delivered an Ascilite2011 Keynote on learning analytics, and serves on the Executive Committee of the newly founded Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR.org). He is a founding member of the Compendium Institute and LearningEmergence.net, and was Co-Founder and General Editor of the Journal of Interactive Media in Education, one of the early open, web-native e-journals. In a schools (K-12) context, he is Chair of Governors at Bushfield School, Wolverton, is a Visiting Fellow at University of Bristol Graduate School of Education, and sits on the Advisory Board of ViTaL Partnerships, which equips schools to build and assess learning-to-learn capacity in students. Elsewhere… a lifelong learner husband to Jackie, dad to Tom, Jas and Jo, a moderate tennis player, a university darts champion many moons ago, a kit and cajon drummer, and a founding member of Visions and Enigma communities exploring postmodern Christian spirituality. The way to my heart is very simple: Thai and Tiramisu. I am rubbish at DIY.
I switched to WordPress in July 2008. 1996-2007 news stories are on my original news site. |
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Oct 23rd, 2010 at 12:04 pm
[...] 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. [...]
Feb 11th, 2012 at 8:20 pm
[...] Simon Buckingham Shum provided mutually overlapping categories for the workshop [...]