On 17th December Simon Knight successfully defended his PhD thesis. Simon’s thesis Developing Learning Analytics for Epistemic Commitments in a Collaborative Information Seeking Environment (supervised by Dr. Bart Rientes, Prof. Simon Buckingham Shum and Prof. Karen Littleton) draws upon diverse literatures to present an instantiation of a theoretically grounded analytic development arising from socio-cultural theory….
We would like to express our sorrow at the sudden death of Al Selvin. Al worked with us here from 2003-2011, when he wrote his PhD thesis "Participatory Knowledge Creation as Facilitated Art: An Investigation into Practitioner Ethics and Aesthetics." As a member of Simon Buckingham Shum’s team, Al also made key contributions towards numerous projects which extended…
A group of KMIers have just returned from the 5th ACM Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK) conference, this year held in Poughkeepsie, New York. Zdenek Zdrahal, Martin Hlosta, and Jakub Kuzilek were attending to present work on OU Analyse, which as well as attracting interest from participants was highlighted in OU PVC Belinda Tynan’s keynote…
After just under 19 years today is the very last day for Professor Simon Buckingham Shum in his KMi office. Arriving here at the very beginning of the Open University’s Knowledge Media Instute in 1995, Simon has risen from Research Fellow to a full Professor as well as serving as a KMi Associate Director (Technology). His…
"As universities adapt for the 21st century, what could be done now, like never before, to fully educate future workers, citizens and fulfilled human beings?" This is the very challenging question which Randy Bass is exploring in a 6-part series of video roundtables (each with a 10min summary) to Reinvent the University for the Whole…
I’ve just returned from the European AIR (Association for Institutional Research) Forum. EAIR is the primary forum for research into the dynamics of the higher education sector and its management, and they invited me to share what’s going on in learning analytics. My keynote introduced the data explosion around ‘customer’ interaction and profiling which has…
KMi is part of the FuturICT FET Flagship project submission, to develop a science of global, socially interactive systems. An open access journal special issue marks the scientific agenda that this 10 year project has mapped out… The European FET Flagships competition has the following mission: FET Flagships are ambitious large-scale, science-driven, research initiatives that aim to achieve…
Last week saw the midterm review for the EPSRC funded Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) project at the University of Southampton. Overall the review went extremely well. In his summing up the review, panel chair Professor James Hendler said “if I could give you a grade it would be an “A” and pointed out that many…
KMi today welcomed the full project team of the EPSRC-sponsored Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) Project. AKT is one of the select EPSRC Interdisciplinary Research Centres, funded for 6 years and a total project cost of �7M. The project begins formally on 1st October 2000, with today’s meeting helping to establish the full ‘modus operandi’. The…
The UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council has just awarded a 3 year project grant to the ScholOnto Project. As part of the Distributed Information Management Programme, this project will provide a Research Fellow and Java Developer to build the public version of a system that has been under small scale prototyping and development…
