Simon Knight

Simon Knight is Director of the University of Technology Sydney, Centre for Research on Education in a Digital Society (UTS:CREDS), previous co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Learning Analytics, and Australian Research Council, Discovery Early Career Award (DECRA) Fellow. His research draws on his interdisciplinary background, holding a BSc in Philosophy and Psychology, Masters in Philosophy of Education and Educational Research Methods, and a PhD in Learning Analytics, alongside university and high-school teaching qualifications.

Dr Knight researches how people learn to navigate uncertainty, disagreement, and evidence, and the mediating role of technology in that. His work has developed design approaches for learning analytics, exploring the use of data as a form of evidence, and design for learning towards epistemic and ethical reasoning. While at Digital Futures, his focus will be on how people learn to engage ethically with AI, through investigation and development of guidelines and cases to support ethical practice.

Recent years have seen a proliferation of guidelines, principles, and design approaches for navigating the ethics of AI across a wide range of domains. This has included application to education, which has received particular attention within research, from institutions as they seek to adapt – in varying ways – to a range of challenges, and rights groups, governmental and supranational organisations. How do people learn about, with, and for these materials? How do people learn to navigate the nuanced ethical concerns that arise in application of technology to learning, and develop approaches (and material resources) to support this? It is not hard to find controversies, examples of bad practice and harms, however, a micro-ethics approach seeks to understand the moment-to-moment ethical judgements made – here, in the context of data production, analysis, and use – and their implications. The research focus over this period will investigate approaches and example resources.