Digital books are now a common part of education, but concerns are growing around the problems of students reading on-screen.

Marte Blikstad-Balas (University of Oslo) discusses the latest research around what it means to read on-screen as opposed to reading from ‘proper’ books, and why government bans on digital devices are not the best response.

Accompanying reference >>> Jensen, R., Roe, A. & Blikstad-Balas, M. (2024). The smell of paper or the shine of a screen? Students’ reading comprehension, text processing, and attitudes when reading on paper and screen. Computers & Education, 219, 105107.

The Australian government has just announced that it will ban all young people under the age of 16 from using social media.

Dr. Clare Southerton explains the background to this ‘ban’ and what it might mean for students and schools.

Recommended reading >>>  Lisa Given (2024). Australia’s social media ban for kids under 16 just became law. How it will work remains a mystery. The Conversation, 28th November.

Digital technologies are now a key means of ‘nudging’ students (and teachers) to make better decisions. 

Mathias Decuypere (PHZH) talks about the coming together of behavioural economics thinking and digital education, and how critical ed-tech scholars should be looking for alternate ways of working with this concept of the ‘edunudge’. 

Accompanying reference >>> Mathias Decuypere & Sigrid Hartong (2023) Edunudge. Learning, Media and Technology, 48(1):138-152

University life is now increasingly mediated by digital platforms. Joe Noteboom’s research looks at the everyday realities of studying through platforms, and how students’ dependence on these technologies can lead to a number of problems and vulnerabilities.  

Accompanying reference >>> Joe Noteboom (2024): The student as user: mapping student experiences of platformisation in higher education, Learning, Media and Technology, DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2024.2414055

Dan Krutka (University of North Texas) is on a mission to support students, teachers and parents to think critically and make informed decisions about the digital tech in their lives.

Dan talks about the idea of the ‘Technoskepticism Iceberg’ as a framework to identify the technical, psychosocial and political dimensions of technology.

Accompanying reference >>>  Pleasants, J., Krutka, D., & Nichols, T. (2023). What relationships do we want with technology? Toward technoskepticism in schools. Harvard Educational Review, 93(4):486-515

Two years on from the initial panic around Chat GPT and student cheating we catch with Phill Dawson from Deakin’s ‘Centre for Research in Assessment and Digital Learning’.

Phill reflects on what universities have got wrong in their responses to GenAI, and why this might be a good time to entirely rethink the notion of student assessment altogether.

Accompanying reference >>>  Bearman, M., Tai, J., Dawson, P., Boud, D., & Ajjawi, R. (2024). Developing evaluative judgement for a time of generative artificial intelligence. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 1-13.

We talk with Sonia Livingstone (Digital Futures for Children, LSE) about the ways in which EdTech and data protection policies often fail to protect children’s rights at school. 

In particular we look at Google Classroom as an example of how policymakers, regulators and governments need to intervene more forcibly in the EdTech marketplace. 

Accompanying reference >>>  Livingstone, S., Pothong, K., Atabey, A., Hooper, L., & Day, E. (2024). The Googlization of the classroom: Is the UK in protecting children's data and rights? Computers and Education Open, 100195.

Pekka Mertala (University of Oulu) talks about a new exhaustive analysis of nearly 1900 articles that charts the evolving use of the ‘digital native’ concept in academic literature.

 We talk about the history of the idea of ‘digital natives’, why the persistence of the idea is damaging, and how we need to actively campaign against its future use.

** this is the final episode of Season One of ETS ... we will return in September! **

 Accompanying reference >>>  Mertala, P., López-Pernas, S., Vartiainen, H., Saqr, M., & Tedre, M. (2024). Digital natives in the scientific literature: A topic modelling approach. Computers in Human Behavior, 152, 108076.

Nathalie DiBerardino (Western University) discusses the growing take-up of emotion AI in schools – tech that claims to detect student attention, concentration, and even interest levels.

 What are the harms of relying on such tech in classrooms, and how might educators  and students push back?

 Accompanying reference >>>  DiBerardino, N. & Stark, L. (2023). (Anti)-Intentional Harms: The Conceptual Pitfalls of Emotion AI in Education. in Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (pp. 1386-1395).

Jack Reed (University of Exeter) talks about the recent UK government push to ban mobile phones from schools in England. 

He fills us in on the motivations of UK politicians, why phone bans need to seen as a human rights issue, and the benefits of taking a postdigital approach to thinking about technology and education.

Accompanying reference >>>   Reed, J. & Dunn, C. (2024).  Postdigital young people’s rights: a critical perspective on the UK government’s guidance to ban phones in England’s schools.  Postdigital Science and Education  10.1007/s42438-024-00464-6