There is something wrong about Camelot, the new TV telling of the Arthurian Legend. It could be the stilted acting, it might be the anachronistic language of the script, perhaps it is the fact that Eva Green always makes me feel a little ill (I swear that woman has a touch of the fey about her), or horror or horrors could it be that the whole Arthurian Legend is now a bit tired? After all, we've...
So the government is shocked and surprised that Universities want to use the new fees system to recover all the money they lost through the HE funding cuts. Most V-Cs seem to think that a charge of 7.5k to 8k would allow them to balance the books again, and many of the UKs stronger Unis think that its an opportunity to charge a prestigious 9k and effectively get an extra 1k per student to improve...
The last five years or so has been an incredible time to be involved in e-learning. We've seen the rise and demise of the Digital Native, the flight and delight of students and academics to Web 2.0 systems, and the attempted murder of the VLE (we now know that reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated). In our work in the Learning Societies Lab we've played our own small part in that ...
So later this year the UK will go to the polls for a referendum on changing our voting system. It will be the first national referendum since 1975. It will also be a massive waste of time and money. Now if we were proposing changing the voting system to something with real constitutional bite - like the Single Transferable Vote (STV, a form of proportional representation) - we should have a ...
Given that we are no longer to spend public money on higher education the new deal for students is progressive and better than their current financial arrangements - but goodness that misses the point! The thing that we all seem to have forgotten is that there is no given and that the privatisation of higher education is not the only way forward. I've seen to much energy over the last few weeks ...
Isn't the Web great? Isn't it crazy and anarchic, vibrant and wild, unpredictable, awesome and thoroughly marvelous? Well it has been, but there is no guarantee that it will stay that way. I've been working with and researching Hypertext for nearly fifteen years. The Hypertext systems that I studied for my PhD were alternative contemporaries of the early Web - based on a desktop model and ...
About a fortnight ago I managed to wrestle a shiny new iPhone 4 out of the University. It's a long and frankly uninteresting story full of needless hoop jumping and energy-sapping effort. Suffice to say that I fought hard for this little device.Two years ago I wrote about why the iPhone 3G was so enormously important. This was a device that wasn't just great to own and use, it redefined the ...
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