During the pandemic, many university professors abandoned traditional textbooks in favor of digital documents or multimedia devices. As a linguistics teacher , I compared electronic communications and printed texts from the point of view of learning. Is the level of understanding of information the same depending on whether it is read on paper or on a screen? And is listening or […] … learn more→

Experts got it catastrophically wrong, according to Dominic Cummings, UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser. Cummings has argued that the UK government’s official scientific advice in March 2020 hugely misunderstood how the pandemic would play out, leading to a delay in locking down that cost thousands of lives. According to Cummings, it was certain specialists […] … learn more→

Conclusions can be hard. There are a few big traps that conclusion writers can fall into. In order to avoid them, try the following three things. Deep breath. It’s good to be bold. The conclusion generally requires bigging up what you’ve done. In a thesis you have to name and claim your original contributions. At the […] … learn more→

Like many people of my generation, I was the first person in my family to earn a degree. The son of a pastry cook and a dressmaker from Cyprus, I was born in London but I couldn’t speak English when I began school in 1967. Still, by the time I took my A levels 14 […] … learn more→

  Boys perform better than girls in tests made up of multiple-choice questions. Multiple-choice questions are considered objective and easy to mark. But my research shows they give an advantage to males. I compared around 500,000 test results of boys and girls who sat the same international test, but whose exam papers differed by detail (although not […] … learn more→

The University of California’s recent negotiations with Elsevier achieved a better deal for researchers than was initially given to them when they walked away in 2018. After a two-year standoff, during which academics at the multi-campus system had no direct access to paywalled Elsevier content, the publisher largely bowed to California’s demand to cut overall costs while allowing California […] … learn more→

Now that children in the UK are back to school, parents have the opportunity to reflect on what can be learned from lockdown homeschooling. Or as some rightly took to calling it, crisis schooling. New research we have conducted examines parents’ experiences of homeschooling – and what made their stress better or worse – during the first lockdown […] … learn more→

Climate change is irreversible. While it is important for universities to reduce their carbon footprints to prevent further damage to the environment, this will do little to mitigate current and ongoing threats – including to their own estate. Each year, universities suffer from extreme weather events that are increasing in frequency and intensity as a […] … learn more→

With the exception of Charles Dickens in the XIX th  century and JK Rowling at the end of the XX th  century, few British children’s literature writers whose works have enjoyed a reception as enthusiastic in their lifetime than that been reserved for the works of Roald Dahl. And the author’s success continues today and goes beyond the boundaries of […] … learn more→

Covid-19 has shown that the world we know can change at any moment. The stress caused by economic, political and social insecurity can lead us to think that planning for the future, even the near and simple one, may seem impossible. For many people, these situations have only compounded the growing sense of insecurity. Although these are […] … learn more→