Another piece I wrote a couple of years ago, unsuccessfully pitched (a shorter version) to a magazine. I’ve been watching my parents’ eyebrows for 6 months now*. A weekly ritual of Skype calls, London to Sydney, and we haven’t quite…
A significant area of research for me over the last 5 years has been in the exploration of ‘searching to learn’ – how students use of search engines can be educational in nature. The ability to find and evaluate information…
The recent ‘right to be forgotten’ (factsheet) has had a lot of attention, I wanted to post a blog a while ago thinking about it but haven’t had enough time to read around the various issues. This is pulling together…
Dan Russell recently posted this TEDx talk on ‘the revolution in asking & answering questions’ (see Dan’s blog on it). It’s a fun watch, and interesting to see someone I’ve (briefly) met do this kind of talk – it’s a…
This is just my stuff (video & slides) from the conference, with a twitter archive thing too, bit pushed for time but I’d encourage everyone to check out the other presentations :-). Based on my reader chapter (Translated into Russian…
Teachers out there,what advice do u give students on discriminating between stories on web? asks @dmrussell http://t.co/BZrT2pmMl8 #edtech — Simon Knight (@sjgknight) November 16, 2013 In that case, Dan was talking about a specific case which serves as a nice…
Today I went down to the BL for a workshop event imagining future library services for researchers using the BL. “This Library 2020 project forms part of a British Library initiative which seeks to identify future information and research needs…
Earlier this year I took the Google Advanced Power Searching with Google MOOC. For one of the assignments I did some research on a relatively long standing interest of mine – the use of internet in exams in Denmark, a…
This evening I met up with Gene Golovchinsky, of FXPAL (Fuji Xerox research institute in Palo Alto). Gene’s work is pretty varied (there was some cool stuff on collaborative whiteboards & storing/retrieving info a while ago) but a big area…
One of the tools I’ve been most impressed by in the student-research-support space, and one which I’ve had the longest interaction with is Instagrok. Instagrok is a tool in which searches map keyterms to related concepts, and provides quick facts…
Last night I went into Google (something very surreal about saying that, and about doing a search From:”Hotel California”; To:”Google”…). Here’s a picture of me with a big google sign… Google (and other search engines)…
Given that assigned tasks are completed in a different way to self-selected/naturalistic tasks, it crossed my mind some time ago that an interesting way to gather data on naturalistic tasks might be to ask people to install an ‘event sampling’…
Does the absence of reply imply no opinion, laziness, no knowledge (“I don’t know about [x,y]”), no positive knowledge (e.g. thinking someone should “go x”) or/and no negative e.g. advising them “don’t go y”), a belief someone else will do…
http://www.extended-knowledge.ppls.ed.ac.uk/?page_id=163 Can I retire and just let Edinburgh get on with it? I’ve never been to Scotland….I wonder if I could visit. I wrote my MA thesis at the IoE on the implications of the extended mind thesis for how…
In the last few blogs I wrote about the problems with cognitivist models of epistemic beliefs and a discourse-oriented approach to viewing epistemic action. I also elaborated on this view in the context of discourse ‘to do’ information retrieval and…
In my parallel blog I highlighted some current work in epistemic cognition and games – particularly ones I think could be fruitful for further investigation. This blog expands that, if you’re interested some of these ideas appear in a different…
Personalisation – Reinforcing a narrow perspective One concern with search personalisation and similar tools is that personalisation narrows perspectives on results, falling into the trap of confirmation bias – users are 1) more likely to search for affirming content and…
Algorithms and big data are provocative right? Is Google personalisation a risk to our epistemic autonomy? Are recommender systems epistemically problematic in general? Is an over reliance on search engines to know what we want – even if we don’t…
Is google making me smarter, stupider, is it all just Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes and can we even trace it? Having seen yet another article on this issue, I thought I’d better have an answer – one other than just rolling my eyes. …
In my work we might look at implementing pragmatic lessons on the web in two ways: 1) the technical solution seeks to represent the data ‘pragmatically’ somehow; 2) the user solution seeks to scaffold the user to understand the pragmatic…
