Making Thinking Visible in Complex Times
Channel: Simon Buckingham Shum
Date: 2018-04-26

Valedictory Professorial Lecture, The Open University, 15th July 2014
Simon Buckingham Shum
Knowledge Media Institute, Open University UK 
http://simon.buckinghamshum.net

(Talk begins 10mins in)

ABSTRACT: In 1968 Doug Engelbart gave “The Mother of All Demos”: a disruptive technology lab had quietly invented the mouse, collaborative on-screen editing, hyperlinks, video conferencing, and much more. This was the start of the paradigm shift, still unfolding: computers were no longer to be low level number crunchers, but might mediate and mould the highest forms of human thinking, both individual and collective. In this talk I review nearly 19 years in KMi chasing this vision with many colleagues, inventing tools for making dialogue, argument and learning processes visible in different ways. How do we harness such tools to tackle, not aggravate, the fundamental challenge facing the educational system, and its graduates: to think broadly and deeply, and to thrive amidst profound uncertainty and complexity? These are the hallmarks of the OU — and indeed, all true education from primary school onwards.

Professional Bio: Simon is Professor of Learning Informatics at the Knowledge Media Institute, combining a passion for learning with human and artificial information systems. He researches, teaches and consults on Learning Analytics, Collective Intelligence and Argument Visualization. His team’s open source software tools have been used by NASA, choreographers, health visitors and group psychotherapists. Simon is a co-founder and Vice-President elect of SoLAR: The Society for Learning Analytics Research, co-founded the Compendium Institute to support the global user community of KMi hypertext tool, and the Learning Emergence network to advance systems learning, leadership and analytics. He was co-founding Editor of one of the pioneering open access, multimedia e-journals, the Journal of Interactive Media in Education. He publishes in an electic range of communities, including the books Visualizing Argumentation (2003), Knowledge Cartography (2008, 2nd Edition 2014) and Constructing Knowledge Art (In Press, with Al Selvin).

Personal Bio: Simon was born in London in 1967, but spent most of his school years in Glasgow. In 1984, he returned south to York University, to follow in his father’s footsteps in Psychology. There he was gripped by the idea that computers could connect cognitively with humans, and took the MSc in Ergonomics at UCL & Birkbeck. Having caught the research bug, he returned to York in 1988 to do a PhD sponsored by EuroPARC, the European satellite lab to Xerox PARC. As part of Diana Laurillard’s New Technology Recruitment Initiative, he arrived at the OU in 1995 at the creation of KMI, where the work of his research team has been recognized internationally in argument mapping, collective intelligence and learning analytics. Within the OU this has translated into new kinds of student experience, and contributions to strategic planning. In March 2013 he was awarded his Chair.