Today, Simon Buckingham Shum was awarded a Chair in the Knowledge Media Institute of the Open University. As Professor of Learning Informatics Simon will bring a Knowledge Media perspective to understanding the explosion in digital data that is having a transformative impact on business, government and data-intensive academic fields. Learning Informatics places the learner at the heart of this challenge and includes a number of key new research topics such as Learning Analytics, Collective Intelligence and Argument Visualization. 

Learning Analytics in particular is now a key concern to our University and others both operationally and in research. Simon has had a leading role in establishing this area as a scholarly field. He was Program Co-Chair for the 2012 Learning Analytics conference, and a co-founder of the Society for Learning Analytics Research. He serves on the Advisory Groups for a variety of learning analytics initiatives in education and enterprise, and is also a Visiting Fellow at University of Bristol Graduate School of Education. He is a founding member of LearningEmergence.net, and was Co-Founder and General Editor of the Journal of Interactive Media in Education. His background is in Psychology (BSc, York), Ergonomics (MSc, UCL) and Human-Computer Interaction (PhD, York).

Congratulations, Professor Buckingham Shum!