INTED2020 Valencia

I managed to get to Valencia for INTED2020 on 1 March, before the lockdown!

A really interesting conference (with 500 presenters from 30 countries), especially because of the high number of presenters from Russia, Latvia, and other Eastern European countries.

Super exchange of ideas on ICT in education. Same time every year. I encourage you to come!

Click here for my paper.

Thanks!

Defining Critical Internet Literacy (Literacy, 2018)

I’m pleased to finally see my article on Critical Internet Literacy published in the print issue of Literacy, after a nine-month wait! Thanks to Ber Dwyer, Julie Coiro, Jill Castek and Don Leu for leading all of us in this important area.
Defining and seeking to identify critical Internet literacy: a discourse analysis of fifth‐graders’ Internet search and evaluation activity. Literacy, 52(3), 153-160. doi: 10.1111/lit.12136.

Click here to see the full paper: CIL Literacy 2018

Are Computers, Smartphones, and the Internet a Boon or a Barrier for the Weaker Reader?

Here is a link to a copy of my recent paper inThe Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy.
Harrison 2016 Boon or Barrier?
In a nutshell, I argue that online reading is good for boys, in that they don’t think of online reading as about ‘books’, but on the down side, boys may find online learning courses lonely and too demanding.

 

Reading Achievement, International Comparisons, and Moral Panic: Do International Reading Test Scores Matter?

Here’s the first paragraph of my recent article in JAAL – click on the link below to go to the full article. Thanks!

Moral panic about reading achievement appears to afflict most English-speaking nations from time to time, and when this occurs, stories of a decline in achievement appear regularly in the media. Referring to the first skills survey by the OECD, The New Yorker asserted, “In basic literacy,…younger Americans are at or near the bottom of the standings among advanced countries” (Cassidy, 2013, para. 1). In the United Kingdom, The Guardian newspaper told a similar story: “England’s young people near bottom of global league table for basic skills” (Ramesh, 2013). Australian students apparently fared no better, even with an emphasis on basic skills: “Focus on basic skills blamed for decline in reading standards” (Patty, 2010). In case you’re wondering whether achievement levels are higher in New Zealand, the birthplace of Reading Recovery, Radio New Zealand (2013) reported, “New Zealand’s scores in reading, maths and science examined by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2012 have fallen since the previous test in 2009” (para. 4). So, have reading achievement levels really fallen in all of these countries, and if they have, what should be done? These are the questions that will be addressed in this column.

https://colinharrisonorg.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/19f6a-jaal-harrison-pisa-and-moral-panic.pdf

Unpublishing 101 – fake journals and the grey economy of open access publishing

In this ‘post-truth world’, fake journals are beginning to become a serious nuisance.

Open-access publication now operates in a kind of academic parallel universe, with over 2000 predatory and exploitative publishers, author fees up to $3,700, automatic acceptance of papers, contrived metrics, fake (or partly-fake) review boards, fake conferences, and bogus proofreading services (for which you pay extra in order to ‘get your English up to international standards’). This grey economy offers academics who are desperate to publish an outlet. And that may be a good thing. But of course if the articles that are published have not been through a rigorous review process, they may be scientifically worthless- or even dangerous.

See my blog at http://colinharrison83.tumblr.com/ for a longer discussion of this topic.

Thanks for reading!