My colleagues and I have published a new article in the journal The Internet and Higher Education. The article is about research conducted a few years ago in which we examined how university lecturers and students use social web technologies for assessment tasks in higher education. In this article we investigate students' experiences of being visible on social media. We explore how students feel about making their assessable work visible to others through blogs and other social technologies. We argue that this experience can be likened to being in a "virtual panopticon" in which students are always aware of being visible and of having a potential audience for their work.  

The article is available on the Internet and Higher Education website and can be downloaded for free until 6th September 2017.  

I am very excited to announce that from December 2017, I will be embarking on a new project, funded by an ARC Future Fellowship, titled Emerging Technologies for Enrichment in Old Age: A Critical Perspective.

The four-year project will investigate older adults' experiences with emerging technologies used for social and emotional enrichment (e.g., virtual reality and social robots). The project adopts a critical perspective to examine both the opportunities and challenges associated with these technologies in aged care settings. Findings will inform the future ethical design and use of emerging technologies to benefit the social and emotional well-being of older adults. 

A new book, edited by my colleagues Deborah Warr, Marilys Guillemin, Susan Cox, and myself, has been published by Palgrave Macmillan. The book, Ethics and Visual Research Methods: Theory, Methodology, and Practice, brings together case studies and reflections from researchers in diverse fields who have all grappled with ethical issues encountered when using visual research methods. The chapters describe a range of visual methods, including participant-generated photography and drawings, video observations, and analyses of online visual material. The authors present in-depth personal insights describing research conducted in sometimes difficult and sensitive settings, where visual research methods are used to overcome some of the limitations of text-based methods but also introduce new challenges. 

Further information about the book is available from the Palgrave Macmillan website. If your institution subscribes to Springer, the book is available to download from the SpringerLink database.