Critical issues and new directions in big data and AI in education

Ben Williamson is the Chancellor’s Fellow in the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh, and the author of Big Data in Education: The Digital Future of Learning, Policy and Practice.


His current research focuses on two key themes. One is the expansion of educational data infrastructures to enable information to be collected from schools and universities, then analysed and circulated to various audiences. The second is the emergence of ‘intimate data’ relating to students’ psychological states, neural activity, and genetic profiles, and the implications for increasingly scientific ways of approaching educational policy and practice.

He previously published Big Data in Education: The digital future of learning, policy, and practice, maintains the research blog Code Acts in Education, and on Twitter is @BenPatrickWill.