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
024 - How Empathy Can Reveal a 60%-Accurate Data Science Solution is a Solid Customer Win with David Stephenson, Ph.D.
023 - Balancing AI-Driven Automation with Human Intervention When Designing Complex Systems with Dr. Murray Cantor
022 - Creating a Trusted Data Science Team That Is Indispensable to the Business with
021 - Turning Complex Cloud IT Data Into Useful Decision Support Info with John Purcell of
020 - How Human-Centered Design Increases Engagement with Data Science Initiatives
019 - The Non-Technical (Human!) Challenges that Can Impede Great Data Science Solutions
018 - The Business Value of Showing the “Why” in AI Models with Jana Eggers (CEO, Naralogics)
017 - John Cutler on Productizing Storytelling Measuring What Matters & Analytics Product Management
016 - Farming with Data: How Advanced Analytics are Transforming the Agriculture Industry with Dinu Ajikutra
015 – Opportunities and Challenges When Designing IoT Analytics Experiences for the Industrial & Manufacturing Industries with CEO Bill Bither
014 - How Worthington Industries Makes Predictive Analytics Useful from the Steel Mill Floor to the Corner Office with Dr. Stephen Bartos
013 - Paul Mattal (Dir. of Network Systems, Akamai) on designing decision support tools and analytics services for the largest CDN on the web
012 - Dr. Andrey Sharapov (Data Scientist, Lidl) on explainable AI and demystifying predictions from machine learning models for better user experienc...
011 - Gadi Oren (VP Product, LogicMonitor) on analytics for monitoring applications and looking at declarative analytics as “opinions”
010 - Carl Hoffman (CEO, Basis Technology) on text analytics, NLP, entity resolution, and why exact match search is stupid
009 - Nancy Hensley (Chief Digital Officer, IBM Analytics) on the role of design and UX in modernizing analytics tools as old as 50 years
008 - Dr. Puneet Batra (Assoc. Director, Machine Learning at Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard) on aligning data science with biz objectives, user re...
007 -Jim Psota (CTO & Co-Founder, Panjiva/S&P Global) on designing a meaningful SAAS analytics product for the global supply chain
006 - Julien Benatar (PM for Pandora's data service, Next Big Sound) on analytics for musicians, record labels and performing artists
005 - Jason Krantz (Dir. of Biz Analytics/Insights, Weil-McClain) on centering analytics around internal customers
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