Tag: technology

  • Is addiction to technology real?

    People are increasingly addicted to smartphones and video games, and this seems to be by design!

  • Screen Time and Children’s Well being

    Screen Time and Children’s Well being

    The UK’s Chief Medical Officers are now officially advising parents to ban their children from using phones and other electronic devices in their bedrooms and during meal times. These are two out of nine specific recommendations made in a recent official report entitled: Screen-based activities and children and young people’s mental health and psychosocial wellbeing:…

  • The Vital Paths, The Shallows, Nicholas Carr: Summary of Chapter 2

    The Vital Paths, The Shallows, Nicholas Carr: Summary of Chapter 2

    This is my summary of chapter two of The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we read, think and remember, by Nicholas Carr. (For my summary of chapter 1, please click here!) Friedrich Nietzsche suffered from severe health problems through most of his life, so severe that he had to resign his university…

  • How Drones are changing Africa

    Inventors and entrepreneurs across Africa are using Drones, or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to tackle some of the ‘development problems’ which the continent faces. Combating poaching, tracking illegal shipping activities, monitoring oil spills and adding value to Safaris. In Nigeria, archaeologists are using drones to map traces of the ancient Yoruba civilization In Sudan, they…

  • Technology Enchantment and Arousal Addiction

    A summary of Zimbardo and Coulombe’s Man Disconnected, part 4. It seemed appropriate to devote a whole blog post to this chapter (chapter 11) as this seems to be the main thrust of the book. (No, the book’s not that well organised!) Chapter 11: Technology Enchantment and Arousal Addiction J.R.R. Tolkein used the word ‘enchantment’…

  • Sociomaterial Perspectives on the self in digital networks

    Sociomaterial perspectives hold that datafication via digital devices (both personal and public) are fundamentally  intertwined with the way we construct our identities and ‘practice selfhood’, so much so that it is more accurate to say that today we ‘live in media’ rather than ‘we live with media’. The most obvious manifestation of the intertwining of…

  • The Big Data Value Chain

    There are three types of company in the big-data value chain: the companies who collect the data, data-analytics companies, and data-ideas companies. This new ‘organisational landscape’ will change the power-relations between businesses enormously, at least according to Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier (2017)  in ‘Big Data’: The Essential Guide to Life and Learning in the…

  • Kahoot for teaching A-level sociology

    Kahoot is an online quizzing platform which allows teachers to create multiple choice quizzes which can be played in-class by students, who access the quiz on a mobile device. Students need to go to Kahoot.it and need a pin (unique to each quiz, and only available once the teacher makes the quiz live) to enter… There are a…

  • Will E-learning Platforms change Education?

    Big data enthusiasts argue that the greater data collection and analysis potential provided by e-learning platforms such as Khan Academy and Udacity provide much more immediate feedback to students about how they learn, and they thus predict a future in which schools and private data companies will work together in a new educational ecosystem… This…

  • Socrative for Teaching and Learning A-Level Sociology

    Socrative is a real-time feedback learning-tool which allows teachers to quickly produce multiple choice, true/ false or open ended questions in order to assess student understanding. Personally I think Socrative is the most useful online learning tool available to teachers and students studying A-level subjects, much more useful than Quizlet, for example, although it still…