Blog Testing

The student voice on technology, wellbeing and society.

This blog post is one of a series on phase two of LSE 2020, a student-focused project that has engaged with 440 students in 2017. It is written by Emma Wilson, Graduate Intern for LTI. You can find her on Twitter (@MindfulEm).

In this post, we discuss an issue that was frequently brought up by students: the impact of technology on society and our emotional wellbeing in an era of ever-increasing interconnectivity. The issues raised provide context into how today’s students navigate the digital age. This will, undoubtedly, have an impact on student expectations about the teaching and learning experience. It also highlights some of the challenges that need to be addressed if we are to support the mental health and wellbeing of our students.


Digital capability includes self-care, and that self-care requires a critical awareness of how digital technologies act on us and sometimes against us. (Beetham, 2016)

Students raised concerns about the impact of technology on our mental wellbeing and our ability to form and maintain relationships. They spoke about digital identity, and how our online activity influences a person’s place in society.

Concern for student mental health has been of increasing importance in recent years. A 2016 YouGov survey of Britain’s students found that 27% reported having a mental health problem, with 63% feeling they had levels of stress significant enough to interfere with daily life. There is the fear that technology (especially social networking and the need for instant gratification) may impact an adolescent’s neurobiology and exacerbate symptoms of stress, anxiety and social isolation. [1][2]

In both the face-to-face interviews and the online survey carried out for LSE 2020, students frequently raised concerns about the impact that technology can have in other areas of life. These concerns have been represented in an infographic and divided into four areas:

  1. Addiction to our devices and social media
  2. Distraction and instant gratification
  3. The distortion of reality and sense of self, and its impact on our self-esteem
  4. The social impact and the changing nature of our relationships

Firstly, students have raised concerns about the impact of technology on our attention spans. With the temptation of constant distraction – from Facebook to checking our phones – this poses the risk that traditional ways of teaching and learning might prove more challenging for today’s student. Given these concerns, it may be more appropriate to use diverse methods to cater for learning preferences. For example, changing the format of a two-hour lecture by interspersing it with interactive elements such as group exercises, short videos or encouraging audience participation.

It is also important to consider the mental health impact from social media and online communication. Whilst students spoke of a world that is becoming more integrated, they were also aware about the distorted reality of a person’s online persona. Despite this self-awareness, it was felt that students were struggling to manage the amount of time spent online.

This highlights the importance of continuing to fund and run wellbeing weeks and self-management course for students, such as those previously conducted by Student Wellbeing Services or the Student Union. The mental wellbeing of students will undoubtedly impact performance and overall satisfaction of the LSE experience.

Finally, students raised concerns about the impact that virtual communication might have upon our face-to-face communication skills.

‘…some people are substituting online interaction for real life meetings’

‘Generally social media has had a detrimental effect on our social lives by increasing social anxiety and limiting real human contact’

Such concerns emphasise the importance of including face-to-face interaction and interactivity during lectures, seminars and group projects. It may also partly explain why students frequently commented on the value they ascribe to discussion and debate within their course. Whilst the online world has become an integral part of the student journey, students are concerned about its social implications and do not want to see the total replacement of human interaction at university.

Moving forward, there is a growing importance for equipping students with the tools needed to manage their wellbeing in the 21st century. This could be facilitated through a whole-university approach between teachers, staff, Student Unions and student wellbeing services.

The mental wellbeing of students will undoubtedly impact performance and overall satisfaction of the LSE experience. We need to work together to ensure that tomorrow’s student is well-equipped for the rigour of higher education.

 

References

[1] ANDERSON, J. & RAINIE, L. 2012. Millennials will benefit and suffer due to their hyperconnected lives. Pew Internet and American Life Project.

[2] GIEDD, J. N. 2012. The Digital Revolution and Adolescent Brain Evolution. Journal of Adolescent Health, 51, 101-105.

Testing Syndicated Posts

I’m experimenting with syndication and if it is working then this post, originally written on Reluctant Technologist, will also be published on CLT@LSE.  The syndication feature is an add-on called FeedWordPress.  It’s available in the version of WordPress that we are running at the LSE but doesn’t appear to be included on wordpress.com blogs.

It works using an RSS Feed.  I simply add my blog feed to the CLT@LSE blog and my posts are published there too.  Rather than publishing all the posts I write here I’ve set-up a category called Syndicated and added the feed for that category to the CLT Blog.  That’s how it works, in theory…

Finger-crossed it does as I’ve been neglecting this blog recently but writing over on CLT so hopefully this will help get me back here/there too!

March 22nd, 2010|Syndicated|Comments Off on Testing Syndicated Posts|

Embedding YouTube in the Blog

The other day I made a post with a link to a YouTube video. I tried to embed it using the code that YouTube supplies but this resulted in the blog looking like someone had taken a sledge hammer to it… and no video.

Today Charlie Beckett was asking how to do this for his POLIS blog so I’ve been looking into it. If you look at my earlier post you’ll see that it is now working but it’s a bit fiddly. I followed instructions posted by Matthias Zeller Memento which involves turning off the visual rich editor while you make the post. I’ve found that you only need to worry about your personal settings so a revision of the instructions would be:

  1. Login to WordPress admin
  2. Go to Users
  3. Uncheck ‘Use the visual rich editor when writing’
  4. Go to Write >> Write Post
  5. Type your post
  6. Paste the ‘embed’ code for your YouTube video in the write box (copied from YouTube)
  7. Publish

And then repeat 2&3 to turn the visual editor back on!

March 16th, 2007|Blogging, Social Media|Comments Off on Embedding YouTube in the Blog|

The Web's New News Thing

Looking to spot the next MySpace? Consider Digg.com, a “social news” site caught up just now in a scrappy battle with AOL. “Social news,” you ask?

[A test using the Digg ‘Blog it’ link. Read more about digg – ML]

read more of this story

August 2nd, 2006|Social Media|1 Comment|

Elgg Test

Test post to see if this appears in my Elgg blog
http://elgg.net/mattl/weblog/

In theory, you can maintain your own blog outside of Elgg but then use RSS to feed it into Elgg

March 3rd, 2006|Tools & Technologies|Comments Off on Elgg Test|

Just to see if we can work with child categories

Here’s a test under Vinayak, which comes under “The Wiki”.

November 11th, 2005|Uncategorized|Comments Off on Just to see if we can work with child categories|

Writely

This is a test page produced online with writely by Matt:

Steve R showed me this.  The great thing is that you can send it straight to your blog.  Have a look at http://www.writely.com

November 2nd, 2005|Uncategorized|Comments Off on Writely|

Trackbacks

are more manual pingbacks (see earlier message)

When you write a blog message about an article in another blog you need to include a Trackback URL which you get from the other blog. The results is the same as a pingback – your blog message becomes a comment on the other blog.

So are they useful? For connecting blog posts / articles / messages (which is correct???) I guess so but will users get them. Mind you as pingbacks are automatic they don’t really need to.

I’ve included a trackback URL in this message for the Pingback post! If you look at the Pingback post you’ll see this message is a comment.

November 1st, 2005|Blogging|Comments Off on Trackbacks|

Pingbacks

Pingbacks and Trackbacks are two features of blogs. I’m still not sure about Trackbacks but i think I have Pingbacks sussed!

When you post an article to our blog any other blog articles you mention in your article are ‘pinged’ (contacted) as part of the publish process. If the blog you mentioned allows pingbacks then your mention of their article will appear as a comment on their site!! Confused? Here’s an example.

On a test blog: mattblog I have posted an article with a link to an article on our CLT blog. When I posted that message the CLT blog was notified via a ping and because the CLT blog allows pingbacks a comment was automatically added… if you take a look at the Multi user Blog Tools article on the CLT blog you will see 2 comments, including one that comes from my test mattblog!

In fact now there are 3 comments – one manual comment, one from mattblog and one from this article – an internal pingback!

October 31st, 2005|Blogging|1 Comment|

Purpose / Use of CLT Blog(s)

In the team meeting today Steve R suggested opening this blog to the wider world. This seems a good a place as any to discuss this…

Ahead of having our own blog server it would be good to think about how we are going to use it / them- what’s the purpose? I’m not against opening the Blog up but do we need a closed Blog too? Maybe not. What would be really nice would be one blog with the ability to restrict posts or categories to certain users. So when posting a message it is either ‘public’ or ‘CLT’. I don’t think WordPress allows this but i may have missed it. I’ve seen it in other blog-type tools such as ELGG

If we’re opening this blog up do we need two? Is a ‘Learning technology News’ or a ‘CLT News’ category within this Blog a possible replacement for the defunct newsletter blog? From our CLT homepage we could just link to the relavant category, for example VLE Evaluation Category

October 28th, 2005|Blogging|4 Comments|