Looking back on 2024 it felt like this was a year in which the role of technology in children’s lives was being questioned like never before. In several countries there was a push back against smart phones in school (or rather than an outright ban teachers were collecting them in and returning to students at… Continue reading What should we do about children’s access to digital devices?
Category: internet
Reporting Atrocity 1
The other day BBC Radio carried a programme on academics who had tweeted or retweeted posts that cast doubt on atrocities carried out by Russian soldiers during the Ukraine war. (There is at the time of writing access to both the programme, 'File on Four: Ukraine: The disinformation war', and transcript of the broadcast at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0017thr)… Continue reading Reporting Atrocity 1
What we can learn about technology from school closures?
Technology, Pedagogy and Education, a journal I am close to, has put out a call for papers on the Covid-19 and the role of technology in teaching [1]. The deadline for abstracts is soon, 17 April, so hurry if you are interested. I'm not writing a paper for it but the lockdown has pushed those of us… Continue reading What we can learn about technology from school closures?
Graffiti and comment forums: An essentially social act gone wrong?
When I find myself disappointed by the tone of online comment forums my mind goes back to toilet graffiti. I am no expert, but there was, I think, a spike in interest in researching toilet (or what Americans might call ‘restroom’) graffiti in the 1970s and 1980s. It is not difficult to see why. Graffiti… Continue reading Graffiti and comment forums: An essentially social act gone wrong?
Football, schools and a changing world
Every year our research students put on a conference and the theme for this year was education in a changing world. For me one of the most obvious but far reaching features of this changing world is our interconnectedness. What happens faraway can have a resonance in ways that were not envisaged in the past.… Continue reading Football, schools and a changing world
Post-truth and a good argument
The term post-truth was, according to Oxford Dictionaries, the Word of the Year 2016. It was defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2016 In USA of course the term became widely used in the context of… Continue reading Post-truth and a good argument
Language learning: a thing of the past?
Language classes started again at our university and I have re-enrolled at intermediate German. From a technology point of view why bother? Online translation programmes are free and efficient and speech recognition has improved to such an extent that there is frequent talk of mobile translation devices that can really work [1]. In fact progress has… Continue reading Language learning: a thing of the past?
Michael Hammond 