Misc

Writing academic books has become somewhat less fashionable in psychology, but I’ve always been encouraged to do things I genuinely want to do rather than be completely guided by the REF, TEF or KEF etc. That advice has always stuck with me.  The book is now almost finished pending some minor edits and a bit of copyediting. I am aware that a few early versions of the manuscript have gone out to some folk who might say something nice for the back cover. Pretty much all the content is new and, I hope, as up-to-date as a book can be. Some of it naturally pulls ideas from a handful of recent papers. On a side note, it's been an interesting experience to wrestle permissions from publishers so I can re-use portions of text or figures from my own papers! Publication is penned for later this year ( update September 2020: you can buy it now) , but in the meantime here are three general things that have stuck with me throughout the course of putting it together. ...

Out of 28,000 teachers who qualified in 2010, just three individuals had a computer-related degree . This makes me wonder just how tech-savvy a lot of 10 to 15 year olds really are. When I was 10 in 1996, my parents purchased our first ever home computer. It had the latest Intel Pentium processor that clocked in at a whopping 120Mhz. To put that in perspective, most iPhones today run at ten times this speed.  Things were tricky at first. Windows 95 took awhile to get used to and most video game developers still preferred MS-DOS as a platform because it provided a more stable environment. Direct X was in its infancy and the Xbox was over a decade away. Microsoft's idea of Plug and Play technology rarely applied and/or worked.  Fifa 96 was a Christmas present that year, but due to MS-DOS being unable to correctly identify the computers CD-ROM drive or sound card, I didn't get to play it until February 1997.  When attempting to run the game, inste...