Richard Noss Lecture: Global polycrisis, liminal space, and generative AI
About this Event
UCL Knowledge Lab is delighted to share this invite to The Richard Noss Lecture 2026!
Our speaker this year is Simon Buckingham Shum, Professor of Learning Informatics at the Transdisciplinary School, University of Technology Sydney.
About the talk:
Higher education has, along with everyone else, absorbed two system shocks in five years: the global pandemic, and generative AI which has moved from curiosity to infrastructure in four years. These are just two elements of the causally entangled bio-physical-social-technological systems constituting our “polycrisis”.
Diverse disciplines now diagnose that our world is undergoing profound transitions, placing us in what anthropologists term “liminal space”: the disorienting experience of leaving familiar land with few maps of what’s on the other side. Within education we’re experiencing this socially, emotionally, epistemically, physically. Universities are of course called to design liminal spaces, to both provoke and contain disorientation, a service that has never been more vital.
In this talk Prof. Buckingham Shum will reflect on the qualities that we need to cultivate if learners are to flourish amidst this turbulence, and the role of interactive software. Over the decades, we’ve built numerous tools for making thinking more visible, used by thousands of students, and professionals. Our studies confirm that cool tools alone never cut it: to foster deeper rather than shallow engagement and reflection requires a systemic approach. Our surveys and focus groups with over 18,000 students tell us they are experiencing and navigating the GenAI disruption in very different ways, which must inform how we work with them to navigate these rapids. And as the evidence mounts on poor learning with GenAI designed to resolve uncertainty as fast as possible, I ask if we can design better tools, ethically compromised though they are, as supports to hold open, rather than collapse, the discomfort of liminality.
Could these work as dialogic partners to help us reflect on our assumptions, learn what is driving the polycrisis, and what must change?
About the speaker:
Simon Buckingham Shum is Professor of Learning Informatics at the Transdisciplinary School, University of Technology Sydney. He previously directed UTS’s Connected Intelligence Centre (2014–26), developing and scaling personalised student feedback using analytics and AI, following nearly 19 years at The Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute.
A co-founder of the Society for Learning Analytics Research, Simon champions human-centred design and explores how software can make thinking visible. His background in psychology, ergonomics and human-computer interaction informs his research into how people adopt new tools for thinking and the futures these tools help shape.. https://Simon.BuckinghamShum.net
Prof. Buckingham Shum's talk will be followed by a panel discussion:
[To be announced soon.]
The UCL Knowledge Lab is an interdisciplinary centre for research, teaching and enterprise in digital media and technologies, based in Bloomsbury and UCL East. It is home to over 50 research staff, four PGT programmes, and one undergraduate programme. The Knowledge Lab holds a large portfolio of funded research projects on a range of different topics from Media, to Creative AI, AI for Education, social semiotics and critical studies of technologies for education. It was originally founded in 2004 by Prof. Richard Noss and Prof. Alex Poulovassilis.
The Director of the UCL Knowledge Lab is Professor Kaśka Porayska-Pomsta.
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Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
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