Dr Ben Williamson
Senior Lecturer in Digital Education

- Moray House School of Education and Sport, IECS
- University of Edinburgh
Contact details
- Tel: +44 (0)131 651 6176
- Email: ben.williamson@ed.ac.uk
Address
- Street
-
Moray House School of Education and Sport, SJ 4.16
- City
- University of Edinburgh (Holyrood Campus)
- Post code
- EH8 8AQ
Background
I am a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Research in Digital Education and the Edinburgh Futures Institute. My current research focuses on educational futures-making across a number of domains of digital and data-intensive practice:
- The mobilization of biological sciences and infrastructures of biometrics, neurotechnologies and bioinformatics as sources of educational knowledge production, policy influence, and practice intervention
- Emerging financial practices of investment and market intelligence analysis in education, and how prospective investments and valuations are intended to materialize educational imaginaries in technical development
- The construction of large-scale data infrastructures by state agencies, global technology corporations and 'edtech' companies to measure performance in schools and universities as a way of shaping and governing the future of education
Current research projects have been funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the Economic and Social Research Council.
I previously published Big Data in Education: The digital future of learning, policy, and practice, and am an editor of the journal Learning, Media and Technology. I maintain the research blog Code Acts in Education, and on Twitter I am @BenPatrickWill.
Open to PhD supervision enquiries?
Yes
Areas of interest for supervision
I welcome enquiries about PhD supervision in the following areas:
Critical social scientific studies of data or metrics in education policy and governance
Education policy studies on digital technologies and/or technology companies
New data-centred sciences in education (e.g. digital psychometrics, biometrics, neuroscience, genetics)