The spread of the Covid-19 virus has presented an unparalleled challenge for society, academia and the social sciences. As universities across the UK and the world have halted teaching activities, closed campuses and moved to online forms of working, major changes have been asked of individuals and society as a whole. As of last week, … Continued
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Book Review: The Quirks of Digital Culture by David Beer
In The Quirks of Digital Culture, David Beer provides a patchwork of quirky vignettes that together create a representative picture of the cultural environment in which we now live, showing how digital culture offers a means of access, insight and possibility while also bringing the payoff of surveillance, manipulation and a sense of inescapability. Ignas Kalpokas highly … Continued
Don’t Just Debunk Covid-19 Myths. Learn From Them
The spread of Covid-19 across the globe has gone hand in hand with the spread of rumours and myth about the virus. In this repost, Anita Makri, discusses how social science research has played a vital role in responding to previous epidemics and argues that rather seeing Covid-19 myths as a problem of information deficit, they … Continued
Book Review: Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events by Robert J. Shiller
In Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events, Robert J. Shiller argues for the significance of narrative when it comes to understanding the drivers of economic events, arguing that contagious narratives not only play a causal role in their unfolding but also that such events transform our narratives. The book raises important issues, writes … Continued
The COVID-19 Online Pivot: The Student Perspective
In his previous post, Martin Weller reflected on the challenges facing university staff facing an indefinite period of distance learning. In this post, he suggests that consideration should be given to students as well as academic staff, who will be deprived of much of the infrastructure and support that face to face teaching supplies, often without … Continued
The COVID-19 online pivot: Adapting university teaching to social distancing
As universities respond to the COVID-19 outbreak by closing campuses and shifting to online forms of distance learning, many institutions and educators are scrambling to develop online engagement plans. In this repost, Martin Weller (Professor of Education Technology at the Open University) brings together a number of useful for resources for anyone looking to develop online learning … Continued
The Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak is an exceptional public health emergency, but we can still learn from the experience of previous epidemics
The spread of COVID-19 poses unique challenges not only to medical researchers, but also to public health authorities and media outlets across the globe. However, the ways in which epidemics interact with human society suggest that much can be learned from previous epidemics. Drawing on the historical response to the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, … Continued
To ensure the quality of peer reviewed research introduce randomness
Journals play an important role in signalling the quality of academic research. This quality is often linked to measures such as the journal impact factor. However, these measures often obscure the overall quality of research papers in a journal. In this post, Margit Osterloh and Bruno Frey argue that the overall quality and originality of … Continued
Book Review: Probing the Corporate Manipulation of Science
In this repost, Christie Aschwanden reviews David Michaels’ The Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception, finding the book to provide a combative and unflinching account of the way in which corporate interests have infiltrated regulatory science. Their secrets are out — the tobacco industry’s decades-long campaign to undermine the science linking their products to cancer … Continued
Open Access Directory – A resource for making sense of the open access landscape
The Open Access Directory (OAD) is a wiki of factual lists on the subject of open access. Designed to make sense out of the chaos of different information about open access, in this post Nancy Pontika recounts why the OAD was created and outlines how it forms an important knowledge base for anyone seeking to … Continued