Distinguished lecture: Dr Simon Knight, University of Technology Sydney

Abstract: Recent years have seen a proliferation of guidelines, principles, and design approaches for navigating the ethics of AI across a wide range of domains. How do people learn about, with, and for these materials? And how do these resources reflect, and thus support learning regarding, nuanced ethical concerns that arise in using technologies in societal settings?

Digital transformations require individual and organisational learning that reflects and impacts practices. However, while finding examples of controversies of bad practices is not hard, there is less clarity regarding resources supporting ethics in practice, particularly in navigating the ways principles become tense in designing, developing, and implementing tools in contexts.

I will set out some approaches and example resources, from some developing work drawing on my own previous learning analytics work, recent collaborations regarding ethics in AI, and analysis of wider literature from the field.

Bio: Dr Simon Knight is Director of the University of Technology Sydney, Centre for Research on Education in a Digital Society (UTS: CREDS), Scholar-in-Residence at Digital Futures, and an honorary associate professor at the UCL Institute of Education. He is a previous co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Learning Analytics and Australian Research Council, Discovery Early Career Award (DECRA) Fellow. 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.

Simon Knight is on Twitter @sjgknight, and his personal homepage is https://sjgknight.com/