People | Member | Simon Knight

PhD Research Student

I'm interested in epistemic beliefs - beliefs about the source, structure, justification and stability of knowledge - and their relationship to actions by individuals and organisations.

On the latter, I wrote my MA thesis in philosophy of education on the implications of one perspective on mind (the Extended Mind thesis) for our understanding of knowledge and its assessment. There I focussed particularly on the use of external tools, and an experiment in Denmark which allowed students access to the internet during their exams (which to my knowledge is still ongoing) and the different notion of 'knowledge' implicated in that sort of system from the UK system. There I was supervised by the Institute of Education's/London Knowledge Lab's Jan Derry http://www.lkl.ac.uk/cms/index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=86

My MPhil explored these beliefs in action, looking at how children talk about their information needs when engaged in collaborative information retrieval activities in the classroom, and finding that these 'epistemic beliefs in action' were - unsurprisingly - related to the quality of information they retrieved. This work also found that their use of 'exploratory talk' - talk in which reasons are explained, ideas respected, etc. - was related to search success. This work was supervised by Neil Mercer at Cambridge http://www.educ.cam.ac.uk/people/staff/mercer/.

My PhD research will explore these beliefs in the context of mapping user epistemic beliefs as linked to their information retrieval behaviours, and working to scaffold the development of these beliefs through the use of learning analytics and collaborative platforms. I will track a group of students engaged in a collaborative subject-based task which requires sourcing and information retrieval. In contrast to more traditional quantitative cognitivist approaches, my focus will be on behaviours in action, and the discursive properties of epistemic acts “to do”, rather than attempting to uncover underlying “belief” structures. I'm now being supervised by KMI's Simon Buckingham Shum and CREET's Karen Littleton.
* http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/member/simon-buckingham-shum
* http://www8.open.ac.uk/education-and-languages/main/people/k.s.littleton&samsredir=1349358009

I am sjgknight on most platforms, and my KMi blog is http://people.kmi.open.ac.uk/knight/

Keys: Cohere, evidence hub, discourse analytics, learning analytics, collaborative information seeking

 

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