Australian students are increasingly taking tests on computers. This includes major tests used to check national progress on literacy and numeracy. The idea is this prepares students “for the future”, because “technology is everywhere”. But as our two recent studies suggest, the way students respond to test questions on computers may not be the same as on paper. This is […] … learn more→

Social media challenges can range from bizarre, hilarious to downright dangerous – it seems there’s no limit to what some people will do for likes. Take the “gallon challenge”, for instance. Social media influencers encouraged their followers to consume a gallon (3.78L in the UK) of milk in 60 minutes without vomiting. Maybe this doesn’t […] … learn more→

Since the start of this school year, we have been surveying teachers in South Australia about sexist views among students. This is part of our research into how online worlds are shaping Australian schooling. In May, we reported the first round of our research. We found South Australian teachers were experiencing a rise in sexist and […] … learn more→

Like most mathematicians, I hear confessions from complete strangers: the inevitable “I was always bad at math.” I suppress the response, “You are forgiven, my child.” Why does it feel like a sin to struggle in math? Why are so many traumatized by their mathematics education? Is learning math worthwhile? Sometimes agreeing and sometimes disagreeing, André and Simone […] … learn more→

“I don’t listen to adults when it comes to this kind of thing,” a 17-year-old told me. We were talking about how digital technology affected his life in the context of a project I ran with colleagues in the West of England to explore young people’s mental health, including the impact of digital technology on their emotional wellbeing . […] … learn more→

OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy envisions a world in which artificial intelligence bots can be made into subject matter experts that are “deeply passionate, great at teaching, infinitely patient and fluent in all of the world’s languages.” Through this vision, the bots would be available to “personally tutor all 8 billion of us on demand.” The embodiment of […] … learn more→

Title of course: Multimodal Anthropology What prompted the idea for the course? “Multimodal” simply means using more than academic written text to present research findings. My first multimodal science project was a third grade project on humpback whales, which was inspired by a vinyl LP recording of their “songs” that National Geographic mailed out to subscribers. In […] … learn more→

In a recent post on world.edu , two anonymous authors decry the universities’ rush to wind back work-from-home arrangements that were instituted during the COVID crisis. In particular, the authors argue that return-to-office (RTO) arrangements are counterproductive for introverts. Their post adopts a widely-accepted definition of an introvert as someone who finds social encounters taxing, rather than energising, […] … learn more→

Artificial intelligence (AI) prophets and newsmongers are forecasting the end of the generative AI hype, with talk of an impending catastrophic “model collapse”. But how realistic are these predictions? And what is model collapse anyway? Discussed in 2023, but popularised more recently, “model collapse” refers to a hypothetical scenario where future AI systems get progressively dumber due to the increase of […] … learn more→

Eric Beecher is a rare beast: a combination of journalist, media owner and idealist. In 1984, aged 33, he became the youngest-ever editor of the Sydney Morning Herald and he has worked around the world as a journalist. He is currently chair and the largest shareholder in Private Media, owner of several Australian news websites, […] … learn more→