You’ve probably noticed lately that a lot of people are trying out alternatives to the big social media networks X, Instagram and Facebook. For example, after Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and started allowing far more disinformation and hateful content on the site, renamed X, advertisers and users started backing away. More recently, Meta’s decision to roll back hate […] … learn more→

The U.S. educational landscape has been drastically transformed since the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered school campuses five years ago. Access to high-quality teachers and curriculum developed by teachers is shrinking, for example. Likewise, there has been a loss of emotional support for students and a decline in the school use of technology and social media. As education scholars focused on literacy practices […] … learn more→

Should young teenagers be banned from using social media? That’s the question being discussed by British MPs debating a bill that proposes the government should decide within a year whether to raise the age children can have social media accounts from 13 to 16. It follows a recent petition on the same topic that garnered nearly 130,000 signatures, […] … learn more→

Let’s look at the following scene: Adrian, age ten, sits down to do his math homework. After reading the first problem, he gets up angrily and shouts: “I don’t understand anything!” He then abandons the task and complains to his mother, who patiently sits down with him and explains what he has to do. It […] … learn more→

Earlier this year I received comments on an academic manuscript of mine as part of the usual peer review process, and noticed something strange. My research focuses on ensuring trustworthy evidence is used to inform policy, practice and decision making. I often collaborate with groups like the World Health Organization to conduct systematic reviews to […] … learn more→

I’ve just finished reviewing a number of research grant applications. One of the things I noticed, and not in a good way, was that writers very often repeated themselves. That is, I not only read the same sentences, but also entire paragraphs and in some instances several paragraphs, in the answers to different questions. Now, […] … learn more→

The Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has secured unprecedented access to at least seven sensitive federal databases, including those of the Internal Revenue Service and Social Security Administration. This access has sparked fears about cybersecurity vulnerabilities and privacy violations. Another concern has received far less attention: the potential use of the data to train a private company’s artificial […] … learn more→

The recent context of the elections in the United States and the controversies surrounding the image of Elon Musk making a Nazi salute have shown the need for education on these photos and videos that circulate massively online. The regulation of uses and technologies is an issue even if Europe measures the limits of the means at its […] … learn more→

Melbourne-based publisher Black Inc Books is seeking to partner with an unnamed AI company or companies and wants its authors to allow their work to be used to train artificial intelligence. Writers were reportedly asked to permit Black Inc the ability to exercise key rights within their copyright to help develop machine learning and AI systems. This includes using […] … learn more→

Most PhD candidates imagine their thesis being read by expert examiners in their field. What they don’t realise is that sometimes their work ends up on the desk of a university committee made up of senior academics from completely different disciplines. As a member of one such higher degrees committee, I’ve reviewed dozens of examination […] … learn more→