Ben Williamson
Senior researcher, Author and Senior Researcher at the University of Edinburgh, UK
Dr Ben Williamson's research traces the connections between educational policy, digital technologies, and practices in schools and universities.
He is the author of Big Data in Education: The digital future of learning, policy and practice (Sage, 2017) and over 30 research articles and chapters. Recent topics of Ben’s research include data analytics, algorithmic decision-making, coding in schools, behavioural apps, and the development of performance metrics in the schools and HE sectors.
He is especially interested in examining how digital technologies and data are brought into education policy and practice through the involvement of policy networks of government agencies, think tanks, consultancies, policy labs and software companies. His current projects focus on ‘intimate data analytics’ such as wearable technologies, and on the ‘data infrastructures of higher education’ that are required for performance measurement of universities.
Ben is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Stirling, maintains a public research blog at https://codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/, and on Twitter he is @BenPatrickWill.