Simon Buckingham Shum is Professor of Learning Informatics at Australia’s University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and Director of the Connected Intelligence Centre (CIC)—an innovation center where students and staff can explore education data science applications. Simon holds a Ph.D from the University of York, and is known for bringing a human-centered approach to analytics and development. He also co-founded the Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR), which is committed to advancing learning through ethical, educationally sound data science.
In this episode, Simon and I discuss the state of education technology (edtech), privacy, human-centered design in the context of using AI in higher ed, and the numerous technological advancements that are re-shaping the higher level education landscape.
Our conversation covered:
Designing for Analytics
simon.buckinghamshum.net
Simon on LinkedIn
#experiencingdata
Designing for Analytics Podcast
Quotes from Today’s Episode“We are seeing AI products coming out. Some of them are great, and are making a huge difference for learning STEM type subjects— science, tech, engineering, and medicine. But some of them are not getting the balance right.” — Simon
“The trust break-down will come, and has already come in certain situations, when students feel they’re being tracked…” — Simon, on students perceiving BI solutions as surveillance tools instead of beneficial
“Increasingly, it’s great to see so many people asking critical questions about the biases that you can get in training data, and in algorithms as well. We want to ask questions about whether people are trusting this technology. It’s all very well to talk about big data and AI, etc., but ultimately, no one’s going to use this stuff if they don’t trust it.” — Simon
“I’m always asking what’s the user experience going to be? How are we actually going to put something in front of people that they’re going to understand…” — Simon
“There are lots of success stories, and there are lots of failure stories. And that’s just what you expect when you’ve got edtech companies moving at high speed.” — Simon
“We’re dealing, on the one hand, with poor products that give the whole field a bad name, but on the other hand, there are some really great products out there that are making a tangible difference, and teachers are extremely enthusiastic about.” — Simon
“There’s good evidence now, about the impact that some of these tools can have on learning. Teachers can give some homework out, and the next morning, they can see on their dashboard which questions were the students really struggling with.” — Simon
“The area that we’re getting more and more interested in, and which educators are getting more and more interested in, are the kinds of skills and competencies you need for a very complex future workplace.” — Simon
“We obviously want the students’ voice in the design process. But that has to be balanced with all the other voices are there as well, like the educators’ voice, as well as the technologists, and the interaction designers and so forth.” — Simon on the nuance of UX considerations for students
“…you have to balance satisfying the stakeholder with actually what is needed.” — Brian
“…we’re really at the mercy of behavior. We have to try and infer, from behavior or traces, what’s going on in the mind, of the humans we are studying.” — Simon
“We might say, “Well, if we see a student writing like this, using these kinds of textual features that we can pick up using natural language processing, and they revise their draft writing in response to feedback that we’ve provided automatically, well, that looks like progress. It looks like they’re thinking more critically, or it looks like they’re reflecting more deeply on an experience they’ve had, for example, like a work placement.” — Simon
“They’re in products already, and when they’re used well, they can be effective. But they can also be sort of weapon of mass destruction if you use them badly.” — Simon, on predictive models
044 - The Roles of Product and Design when “Competing in the Age of AI” with HBS Professor and Author Karim Lakhani
043 - What a Product Management Mindset Can do for Data Science and Analytics Leaders with Product School CEO, Carlos González de Villaumbrosia
042 - Why Machine Learning and Analytics Alone Can’t Drive Behavioral Change inside Police Departments with Allison Weil
041 - Data Thinking: An Approach to Using Design Thinking to Maximize the Effectiveness of Data Science and Analytics with Martin Szugat of Datentreib...
040 – Improving Potato Chips and Space Travel: NASA’s Steve Rader on Open Innovation
039 – How PEX Fingerprinted 20 Billion Audio and Video Files and Turned It Into a Product to Help Musicians, Artists and Creators Monetize their Work
038 – (Special Co-Hosted Episode) Brian and Mark Bailey Discuss 10 New Design and UX Considerations for Creating ML and AI-Driven Products and Applica...
037 – A VC Perspective on AI and Building New Businesses Using Machine Intelligence featuring Rob May of PJC
035 – Future Ethics Author and Designer Cennydd Bowles Shares Strategies for Designing Ethical Data Products That Benefit Our Business, Community and ...
034 – ML & UX: To Augment or Automate? Plus, Rating Overall Analytics Efficacy with Eric Siegel, Ph.D.
033 - How Vidant Health’s Data Team Creates Empathetic Data Products and Ethical Machine Learning Models with Greg Nelson
032 - How and Why Talented Analytical Minds Leave People Scratching Their Head Around Data with Nancy Duarte
031 - How Design Helps Enable Repeatable Value on AI, ML, and Analytics Projects with Ganes Kesari
030 - Using AI to Recommend Personalized Medical Treatment Options with Joost Zeeuw of Pacmed
029 - Why Google Believes it’s Critical to Pair Designers with Your Data Scientists to Produce Human-Centered ML & AI Products with Di Dang
028 - Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic On Data Storytelling, DataViz, and Why Your Data May Not Be Inspiring Action
027 - Balancing Your Inner Data Science Nerd While Becoming a Trusted Business Advisor and Strategist with Angela Bassa of iRobot
026 - Why Tom Davenport Gives a 2 out of 10 Score To the Data Science and Analytics Industry for Value Creation
025 - Treating Data Science at IDEO as a Discipline of Design with Dean Malmgren
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