Simon Knight

I maintain a complete CV at http://people.kmi.open.ac.uk/knight/cv/

I'm interested in the ways knowledge is conceptualised. In my MA work this was reflected in my focus on the epistemological implications of a particular stance of mind (the extended mind hypothesis of Andy Clark) for our understanding of knowledge & its assessment. In particular I was interested in the epistemic implications of the Danish decision to permit the use of the internet in exams.

This interest has endured, & I am particularly interested in the epistemic implications of knowledge management tools such as google - a topic on which I've blogged, & been invited to speak (e.g. at the Society of the Query conference, Amsterdam, 2013). Here the issue relates to the epistemic commitments implied in the socio-technic issues around filter bubbles, use of faceted search, social features in search and personalisation of results, features raising awareness of multiple perspectives, the way search engines present a 'lack' of results, and so on.

My PhD research is focussed on the psychological side of this issue, exploring the way that students on shared information problems search for, & talk about, information to address that problem & the kinds of analytics we can gather in that context. This is particularly interesting given the scope to support different assessment models, & provide useful formative feedback to students in their information seeking activities. To some extent this research began in my MPhil work - which looked at dialogue in collaborative information seeking amongst 11 year olds, finding that exploratory talk was particularly associated with improved results. Certainly while my current work is focussed more on older students, my background in schools means I'm particularly interested in pushing at the boundaries of assessment at all levels of education, & addressing both the socio-technic, & philosophical (epistemological) issues around possible new tasks and measures.