When I speak to parents and teachers about texting, things often get awkward soon. They all know the situations of teenagers sharing nude pictures with each other while e.g. in a relation, but things go wrong when those pictures are shared beyond that relation. Many adults will say ‘just don’t sext’, but that doesn’t seem… Read More Is it time to teach teens ‘safe’ sexting?
The past week my wife and I watched both The Inventor and the Netflix documentary about the Fyre Festival. This was both a great idea and a bad one. First the trailers, so you know what I’m talking about. The Inventor tells the true story behind the ‘Edison’, Theranos the company who made this machine… Read More Maybe it’s a good/bad idea to watch these two documentaries in a row (about Tech and Education)
I’m sure this still will come as a big surprise to many, but it’s pretty difficult for results to be as clear: Time spent using social media was not related to individual changes in depression or anxiety over 8 years. This lack of a relationship was found even in the transition between adolescence and… Read More A new 8-year long longitudinal study on time spent on social media shows a non-impact on mental health
It’s an often repeated claim, but it seems hard to proof: our smartphones seem not to be the reason some of our children feel worse. From the press release: A new study, published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science, suggests that the time adolescents are spending on their phones and online is not that bad.… Read More Maybe it’s not the smartphone: study of 400 teens finds little evidence linking excessive smartphone use and mental health outcomes
The past few years we saw many negative effects of Facebook, but not all is negative. In short: Type of friends affects building social capital via Facebook and traditional media. Facebook compensates for traditional media with friends from high school. With college friends, those with lower self-efficacy gain more from Facebook. With college friends, those… Read More A different kind of result: Facebook can help college students with lower confidence build relationships
This study will hurt reading. No, really. Why? It shows that students think it is instructors’ responsibility to ensure they don’t surf the web in class, according to a new study. So, dear teacher you’d better be entertaining enough. It seems Neil Postman was right after all? From the press release: In a recent mixed-method… Read More YouTube killed the teaching star?
Show me which groups you take part in on social media or which pages you like, and I’ll tell you how good you’ll do in school. Well, that could well be the interpretation of this study, but a couple of things: correlation doesn’t mean causal relation (!) being part of some social media groups means… Read More A study prone to be misunderstood: a possible link between social media groups and academic performance
