Knowledge Centre blogs

Perspectives on technology and vulnerable young people (1/4)

By: Dan Sutch
On: 19th June 2012

In this brief series, Terry Waller talks with four leading researchers to gain some personal perspectives on the role of technology in the education of vulnerable young people. The interviews aimed to provide an insight into existing practice, research gaps and potential future areas of investigation, highlighting the challenges and opportunities provided by the internet.

This first article presents the views of Don Passey, Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University.

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Making Hay

By: Dan Sutch
On: 7th June 2012

The Hay Festival is always a great calendar entry: wonderful setting, fascinating talks, and an interested, thoughtful audience ready to discuss key issues. The festival also provided the opportunity for us to launch Nominet Trust’s new £2m social investment programme to fund new ideas for using digital technology to improve young people’s economic and social participation.

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The Challenges of Digital Making

By: Dan Sutch
On: 25th May 2012

As part of the Digital Makers programme that we’re developing with Nesta, Mozilla and a range of other partners, I was able to share some of the challenges that this programme is navigating and looking to address at an event at Ravensbourne College on Friday 25^th May.

Tom Keynon, from Nesta did a great job in providing some of the practical activities within the programme and set the broad context for the work [I will add a link to his presentation when available). I followed to set out some of the challenges underpinning that. I’ve numbered the following paragraphs in case you want to click through the slidedeck that I shared.

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iKnowHow: building a wiki for the voluntary sector (part twelve) The purpose behind the persuasion

By: faulkner.marie1
On: 4th May 2012

Last week David Wilcox commented on the 11th blog post rightly saying 'I agree with the analysis. But do you want to continue with idea of *persuasion* when the theme is now relationships and network building?'.
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The Digital Divide - an issue of ethics?

By: Simon Knight
On: 4th May 2012

For today’s blog I thought I’d take a step back and consider some of the ethical imperative for studying the digital divide.

Meaningful Access

Sometimes, we take it as a given that such divides must be addressed, that we know what the divide is, and that we know how to address the divides – we just, close them. more >

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Finding Knowledge - young people's use of search engines

By: Simon Knight
On: 16th April 2012

Some thoughts on my practical experiences of field work (and preliminary outcomes!)

I’ve now done three runs of my field work and started analysing the data. So today I thought I’d discuss some of the preliminary findings, and their implications. The findings are interesting in themselves, but I also want to highlight some of the benefits of the methods I used – recording talk, and ‘on-screen’ behaviours of groups of children completing search engine tasks.