Richard's blog

Tag: technology

  • On Online and Offline Culture

    On Online and Offline Culture

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    Reading Time: 3 minutesThe Guardian has an article about [Going Offline is Fun](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/19/going-offline-is-fun-living-offline-was-not-just-ask-a-child-of-the-90s). It’s about how “young” people are trying to disconnect from mobile phones and other technology. There was another article about how 61 million CDs have been sold as people buy physical media rather than digital copies. When the web and social networks…

  • On Technological Literacy of Parents

    On Technological Literacy of Parents

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    Reading Time: 3 minutesYet again I see an article about children being banned from using mobile phones before they are thirteen years of age and once again I find myself asking, “but what if parents had the required digital literacy to help children and teens?” and “What if teachers had that digital literacy too?” Ireland…

  • AI and the Cult of the Lazy Amateur

    AI and the Cult of the Lazy Amateur

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    Reading Time: 6 minutesWe are all familiar with the phrase. We learn better when we write things by hand, rather than when we type them on the keyboard. For decades people have been against typing, saying "It’s cold, it’s dead, it’s impersonal". Those same people will then say "you have awful handwriting" and yet still…

  • Of Teens, Antisocial Media and Leadership

    Of Teens, Antisocial Media and Leadership

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    Reading Time: 2 minutesIn England, Australia and Switzerland parents want to ban mobile phones from children beneath 14 years of age. In theory this is an excellent idea this is a fantastic and fabulous idea, because it means parents can avoid spending thousands of francs per year on mobile phones, and tech is seen as…

  • Learning By Writing despite GPT

    Learning By Writing despite GPT

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    Reading Time: 3 minutesI am old enough to remember a teacher writing on a board or piece of plastic for an overhead projector. “Why don’t you just give us photocopies of what you’re writing instead of asking us to copy down what you’re writing. “Because you will remember it better if you write it down.”…

  • The High Tech World is not making us weak and weird.

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    Reading Time: 3 minutesThe High Tech world is not making us weak and weird. I believe that the opposite is true. According to Patrick Mustain in his article “Welcome to the Devolution: The High-Tech World Is Making Us Weak and Weird” for The Daily Beast he worries that modern technology and conveniences have taken the…

  • 10 Billion People for Dinner

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    Reading Time: < 1 minuteHaving ten billion people to feed will have consequences.

  • The Digital Lifestyle

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    Reading Time: 2 minutesA journalism student at the University of Westminster worked on an item about addiction to technology and this is quite an old item. In 1998 (if I remember correctly) I was speaking to a security guard in Martinique about the internet and he talked about it as if it was a disease…

  • Oversimplification

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    Reading Time: 2 minutesThe more time you spend online the more headlines and articles you read, the more you see mass idiocy. Every time a phone comes out that’s slightly similar to the iPhone they rant about how similar to the iPhone it is. It’s not. There are several models of phones preceding it. My…