CLRN Blog

Mark Griffiths reflects on the realities, implications and consequences of “screen time” in the context of gaming. He argues that it is not about the amount of screen use, but rather about its content and context. His piece follows a special workshop¹ convened by the Media Policy Project and Parenting for a Digital Future on ‘Families and “screen-time”: challenges of media self-regulation’ and the publication of a new policy brief about families and “screen time”, authored by Alic Read More...

Jen Persson  discusses the background and implications of the Department for Education’s policy and practice on collecting and sharing the personal data of 20 million children in the National Pupil Database. There has been no public or parliamentary consultation on recently proposed changes to collect pupils’ country of birth and other personal data, and this raises significant questions of trust and privacy invasion. Jen is coordinator of defenddigitalme, which campaigns for children’s privacy Read More...

School How can researchers study children’s digital and social lives? Our study of The class began at school, an institution that plays a defining role in young people’s lives. We soon realised that how they made sense of their classroom experiences and school life was largely unaffected by the fierce discursive struggle going on above their heads among governments, pedagogues, technologists and pundits seeking to redefine the purposes and practices of education in the digital, networked age. But schoo Read More...

What goes on at school, in today’s classroom or in the lunch break? What do kids get up to on the way home from school? Is everyone staring at a screen all day, whether at the front of the class or under the desk? For parents, children’s experiences at school are often unknown, hidden behind the stock answer “nothing much”, when asked: “what happened at school today?” Image credit: V. Donoso In my contributions to this blog, I have often drawn on insights, findings and arguments of The Cla Read More...

Parents turn to educators for advice on how they should integrate digital media into their children’s learning. Yet educators are not in agreement about what digital media can offer to children and young people’s learning. Summarising the key findings from an article written with Alicia Blum-Ross, published this week in a special issue of the Journal of Digital and Media Literacy, Sonia Livingstone examines how educators’ hopes for digital media have, over time, moved from ‘voice’ to ‘entreprene Read More...

Do parents find the new digital age a frightening place to be? Sonia Livingstone considers recent media stories and what might really be going on in family’s homes. Sonia is Professor of Social Psychology at LSE’s Department of Media and Communications and has more than 25 years of experience in media research with a particular focus on children and young people. She directs the EU Kids Online project and is the lead investigator of the Parenting for a Digital Future research project.  Is anxi Read More...