Oklahoma is included in the list of states I’ve visited during my lecturing career, but just barely; in 2012, when I was participating in a professional development conference for teachers and administrators in the Fort Smith, AR school district, I took the opportunity to drive across the Arkansas River and have lunch at the 4…
In August, International Data Corporation (IDC) predicted that 1.44 billion smartphones would be shipped in 2015, a 10.4% increase over the preceding year. It is a safe bet that a hefty percentage of those smartphones will be tucked under a Christmas tree a week from now. Thousands upon thousands of teens (and even younger children)…
How much privacy should your child have? That’s a question that parents and children have been debating for quite some time, but with increasing intensity over the last few decades. As you might expect, parents vary widely in the amount of privacy they allow their children. (And the protestations of my younger son–at age 4(!)–notwithstanding,…
Parents love to complain about how much more challenging it is for them to parent than it was for THEIR parents, or frankly, any preceding generation in human history. But you have to feel some sympathy for the parents of millennials (let alone those dealing with the Generation Zers). As Steve Jobs said in 2007…
A 13-year-old girl in Dallas, TX is facing a third-degree felony charge for posting a shooting threat on Instagram. Officials at the T.W. Browne School in southwest Dallas were told last Monday night that someone had posted a photo to Instagram of man pointing a gun straight at a camera, with the following grim caption:…
Nearly 900 years ago, in 1154, an English bishop named Nicholas Breakspeare was elected Pope, and took the name Adrian IV. He is thus far the only Englishman to serve as the Holy Pontiff. Pope Adrian IV only served for five years before his death in 1159, and left at most a modest footprint on…
In May 2014, a substitute teacher at Highland Park High School in Highland Park, IL (a suburb just north of Chicago) raised concerns that two of his students had been cheating. Following an internal investigation, the high school not only sided with the students but told Steven Habay, then 40, that he was being released…
A short time ago, I wrote a blog post about the need to reframe the discussion over the involunatary capture and distribution of intimate images (colloquially described as “revenge porn”) so as to better capture its true nature: “electronic sexual assault.” One of the concerns that I expressed in that post is that the terminology…
Three weeks ago, Revere High School senior Caley Godino, the captain of the school’s cheerleading squad, received a tweet from her Civics teacher. The day before, the teacher’s tweet said, the turnout for the Revere city election was a shockingly low ten percent; what did the students think about that? Godino responded before school on…
Given the growing importance of technology in our world, it shouldn’t come as a surprise when the cyber- prefix invades another academic discipline. And yet, as I researched this blog post this morning, I was a little startled to realize just how long psychologists have been working the field of cyberpsychology. For the uninitiated, cyberpsychology…
