June, 2014
Toddlers, ipads and story apps- how intuitive are they?
Tablets and apps are often described as intuitive to use. Recently I was involved in a Collaboration Sheffield Initiative project between Sheffield University and Sheffield Hallam University that allowed me to consider the accuracy of this belief. The project examined the interaction of young children, between the ages of 0 and 3-years, with iPad story […]
Saving the world with media literacy?

Hello. I run a ‘media practice’ research centre where most of our work is with media / media arts teachers in FE and HE but we also edit the Media Education Research Journal, where we would love to publish more research into younger children’s media education and we do research into children’s media literacies. […]
Shifting the frame? Reflections on assessment
We know from experience that assessment frameworks influence practice in schools and that the scope of new tests in English are likely to shape priorities for literacy provision. Of course when working with the new National Curriculum in England, we can make strong arguments for using digitally mediated – including moving image – texts to […]
Offline/ Online Play: Augmented Reality Apps
For a number of years, my research has been exploring the offline/ online interface in relation to play, as children engage in play in online sites which relates to their toys, artefacts and offline practices (see Burke and Marsh, 2013). Augmented reality apps build on this ‘real’ world/ virtual world dynamic and are a growing […]
Objectionable content?
‘Basically, porn is everywhere’ was the title of a report published last year by the UK Children’s Commissioner. If not exactly everywhere, pornography is certainly much more accessible today, not least to children and young people. Estimates suggest that there are over one million pornographic websites, and that one in eight online searches is for […]
Two-year-olds: the big research gap?
It’s notoriously difficult to investigate what is going on in very young children’s engagements with moving-image media. Rag Doll Productions, the creators of Teletubbies and In the Night Garden, have accumulated an enormous video archive of toddlers and preschoolers watching their programmes. But only a minority are filmed in children’s own homes, and they cannot […]
Children and Film
On Tuesday I am heading to the European Conference on Children’s Film and then the KIDS Regio Forum 2014. I’m very keen to exchange ideas with other researchers, children’s content creators, funders and distributors from within the European film industry. The aim of the forum is to raise the profile and increase access to children’s […]