Teaching Apples and Oranges

Alun Digital Academia, Politics No Comments , , , ,

Introduction to Monstering

There’s an inter­est­ing story on the BBC News web­site: Teach­ing ‘bet­ter at school than uni­ver­sity’ — survey

When asked to com­pare teach­ing at school and uni­ver­sity, less than one-in-five privately edu­cated pupils favoured their uni­ver­sity tutor­ing. Almost two-thirds declared that the teach­ing they had at school had been better.

The res­ults are not a sur­prise. I took A-levels (pre-university exams) twice. The first time I was taught maths, chem­istry and phys­ics and I learned about chem­istry and physics.

The second time was a few years later for Eco­nom­ics and Law even­ing classes. Here I was taught what I needed to know to pass the exams. In the case of Law, there were always four ques­tions in Paper II, Hom­icide, Tort, Con­tract and Con­sti­tu­tional law. You needed to answer two of four, so the even­ing class only covered Hom­icide and Tort. I do not have a roun­ded legal edu­ca­tion, but the col­lege was not graded on my edu­ca­tion it was graded on the res­ults I got. Behind trained for the exam was a huge suc­cess and I scored more UCAS points on my one year even­ing class courses than in my two year stand­ard courses.

Every year for over twenty years the num­ber and qual­ity of A-level passes has gone up. The argu­ments are usu­ally over whether or not the exams are get­ting easier, or the pupils bet­ter. What is less often noted is that schools are graded and com­pared against their neigh­bours on their pass rate. Unsur­pris­ingly they’ve become more and more ruth­less about train pupils to pass an exam because that’s what mat­ters, not whether or not they under­stand why they’re doing what they’re doing.
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It’s easy to knock the Lib Dems on tuition fees, but what’s the solution?

Alun Politics 2 Comments ,

Another Decem­ber post that got delayed till now, but now if I blog on the New Col­lege of the Human­it­ies you have some idea of where I might be com­ing from.

If I were a Lib Dem intent on break­ing a pledge, or a Con­ser­vat­ive who genu­inely believed the policy I were sup­port­ing, there’s one simple change I would make to the bill.

David Cameron has stated that when it comes to the fin­an­cial crisis, we’re all in it together. Here is his oppor­tun­ity to prove it. I would add a clause to the Edu­ca­tion bill that any MP vot­ing in favour of fees will be be expec­ted to pay back a ‘loan’ at the equal to the highest value of ‘loan’ paid by a stu­dent. If the nation is not bene­fit­ing from a stu­dent gradu­at­ing from a course Philo­sophy, Polit­ics and Eco­nom­ics at Oxford in 2015, then nor can it have bene­fit­ted from someone gradu­at­ing from the same course in 1988. If the MPs are sin­cere that the free ride at the tax payer’s expense has to stop then they should be the first to get off.

There are some reas­ons why such a clause could not hap­pen, but they don’t hold water.

  1. You can’t just drop a massive bill on to someone with little or no warn­ing.
    Actu­ally you can, and this is exactly what Par­lia­ment intends to do to sev­en­teen year olds in Eng­land from 2012.
  2. You’re elim­in­at­ing choice, some MPs would not have taken a degree if they were aware of its cost.
    Incor­rect, if the gov­ern­ment it to be believed. They are very clear that the pro­spect of start­ing work­ing life £50,000 in debt to the state is in no way a dis­in­cent­ive to education.
  3. The MPs already have fin­an­cial com­mit­ments, they could not afford to pay such fees.
    Stu­dents pay­ing off these ‘loans’ will still be pay­ing off these ‘loans’ when their own chil­dren start uni­ver­sity. Fur­ther, fees will only be paid by people who can afford to pay them. Any MPs earn­ing under £21,000 will not pay a penny.

This isn’t going to solve everything. There’s still the small mat­ter that thou­sands of people feel the Lib­eral Demo­crats have stolen their vote. Still, at the moment the pub­lished plan is to force chil­dren who have had no oppor­tun­ity to vote to pay for an edu­ca­tion that MPs got for free. It’s the polit­ical equi­val­ent to hanging around the school gates and bul­ly­ing the small kids out of their lunch money. Pay­ing the fees won’t magic­ally make everything alright but it will make a dif­fer­ence. It will at least allow MPs to estab­lish their sin­cer­ity rather than leave them with the odour of pig­gies who want to keep their noses in the trough.

We might all be in it together, but at the moment some of us are def­in­itely more in it than others.

The UK government’s attack on the Humanities is an attack on democratic accountability

Alun Politics 1 Comment ,

This was writ­ten in Decem­ber 2010. It’s going up now because I was extremely busy in Decem­ber 2010 and it’ll be handy to have it pub­lished as a ref­er­ence for one or two other posts.

Not every­one will know what’s hap­pen­ing in the UK, so if you’re from over­seas or a Lib Dem MP here’s the state of what’s hap­pen­ing to Higher Edu­ca­tion in the UK.

The UK used to have free edu­ca­tion at the point of deliv­ery. In fact even into the 1990s stu­dents used to get grants to attend uni­ver­sity. Stu­dents who went through this sys­tem are now in par­lia­ment. For some, their place in par­lia­ment is due to this government-subsidised education.

Grants were removed and replaced with loans dur­ing the 1990s. In the late 1990s the Blair gov­ern­ment added this “top-up fees” of “up to £3000 pa”. This turned out to be a blanket fee of £3000 pa at every uni­ver­sity. In the later days of the Gor­don Brown gov­ern­ment the Prime Min­is­ter appoin­ted Lord Browne, the man who made BP a shin­ing example of cor­por­ate suc­cess, to pro­duce a report on fund­ing the universities.

This report declared:

A degree is of bene­fit both to the holder, through higher levels of social con­tri­bu­tion and higher life­time earn­ings, and to the nation, through higher eco­nomic growth rates and the improved health of soci­ety. Get­ting the bal­ance of fund­ing appro­pri­ate to reflect these bene­fits is essen­tial if fund­ing is to be sustainable.

This bal­ance will be import­ant because not all courses will get the same funding.

A UK BA/BSc is in one sub­ject. If you take a BA in Eng­lish, you have many mod­ules, but all of these will be based on Eng­lish lit­er­at­ure. There is no need for a set num­ber of sci­ence cred­its to gradu­ate. But the spe­cial­isa­tion starts much earlier. To get on a course you will need to have taken three Advanced-Level (A-Level) courses (except Scot­land which has its own sys­tem). To get on to Phys­ics for example you will need A-Levels in Phys­ics, Maths and one more sub­ject. A-levels are taken between ages 16–18, so stu­dents are already locked into a nar­row set of options without know­ing there would be fin­an­cial con­sequences. To get onto a set of A-level courses you could, in the­ory, need a cer­tain set of GCSEs so spe­cial­isa­tion could start at 14 in the UK. In real­ity pupils cover such a broad range of GCSEs that it’s not usu­ally a prob­lem. But cer­tainly, you have a couple of years of stu­dents pretty much locked into their course choices and now the Gov­ern­ment as switched the costs.

So this is where we are with fund­ing: “Get­ting the bal­ance of fund­ing appro­pri­ate to reflect these bene­fits is essen­tial…” Under the new sys­tem non-STEM (Sci­ence, Tech­no­logy, Engin­eer­ing, Maths) sub­jects will get £0 fund­ing. Fund­ing will be entirely through ‘fees’. The man­tra for all parties is that it’s the stu­dent who bene­fits, there­fore the stu­dent should pay. When they remem­ber they’ll actu­ally say the gradu­ate will pay and hope that gradu­ates with degrees aren’t con­nec­ted in any sig­ni­fic­ant way with stu­dents doing degree courses.

If you view edu­ca­tion purely as a per­sonal bene­fit, this makes sense. Does the coun­try need large num­bers of clas­si­cists who under­stand how the Athenian Empire fell? Pos­sibly not. On the other hand if you have a demo­cratic elec­tion in a coun­try that’s invaded another coun­try to impose régime change, then an elect­or­ate that has ana­lysed sim­ilar events in ancient his­tory might have a per­spect­ive on whether or not that was a good idea. The gov­ern­ment dis­agrees, and that’s why Clas­sics is not being funded.

Per­haps we don’t need thou­sands of people spe­cific­ally trained to exam­ine how the details of the Mar­shall Plan also pro­tec­ted Amer­ican eco­nomic suprem­acy in the post-war years, but an elect­or­ate trained in basic tech­niques of ana­lys­ing evid­ence to see how the past influ­ences today would be a national asset wouldn’t it? No accord­ing to the gov­ern­ment, which has with­drawn all His­tory funding.

You might think this is a bit dodgy and that a soci­ety requires a cer­tain degree of edu­ca­tion. But is under­stand­ing the mech­an­ics of soci­ety really that use­ful? The gov­ern­ment says no, and Soci­ology is get­ting £0 under the new sys­tem. Want to ask how the gov­ern­ment can be sure that it knows the right answer? That kind of thought­ful cri­tique is not an asset to the nation accord­ing the gov­ern­ment, so Philo­sophy is cut. This might be eco­nomic mad­ness, but the gov­ern­ment sees no value in help­ing people judge if it is or isn’t. Eco­nom­ics fund­ing is cut. Want to com­pare our sys­tem with oth­ers. The gov­ern­ment won’t be fund­ing any­one who wants to learn the lan­guage neces­sary to find out. As for any­one that wants to study Politics…

Philo­sophy, Archae­ology, Law etc… will sur­vive due in part to the pat­ron­age of the rich and those stub­born enough to seek an edu­ca­tion that the gov­ern­ment doesn’t value. Edu­ca­tion has been reduced to a purely eco­nomic com­mod­ity, and so the man­tra is that it must be eco­nom­ic­ally jus­ti­fied. There is no recog­ni­tion that an edu­cated elect­or­ate is neces­sary for a func­tion­ing demo­cracy. I bene­fit from large num­bers of people being edu­cated and able to spot when a policy is a fantasy, because it has con­sequences at the bal­lot box. This is a func­tion of edu­ca­tion that isn’t an eco­nomic asset because demo­cracy isn’t inher­ently an eco­nomic asset. If it were inher­ently an asset then we wouldn’t be spend­ing bil­lions sup­port­ing dic­tat­ors around the world, and over­seas tycoons wouldn’t be spend­ing large amounts of money on elect­oral cam­paigns to block equal access to the elect­or­ate. David Cameron is firmly estab­lish­ing that edu­ca­tion is not some­thing he admires in an elect­or­ate, and that’s why it’s neces­sary to tax it.

Nick Clegg shows us his election face

Nick Clegg shows us his elec­tion face

Con­ser­vat­ive sup­port­ers will under­stand­ably balk at the idea that their fees are an edu­ca­tion tax, they’re called fees. How­ever the fees are gov­ern­ment redis­tri­bu­tion of wealth. The idea that once politi­cians have this tax they won’t dip into it for other pro­jects is simply not cred­ible. I was rap­idly over­taken by real­ity. Gov­ern­ment cuts to uni­ver­sit­ies’ budgets will hap­pen a year before they get fund­ing from the new fees régime. So the first year of the Edu­ca­tion Tax will be used to pay for defi­cit reduc­tion not edu­ca­tion. The BBC Licence fee now funds more than the BBC. Cur­rently there’s a slice off it to pay for Broad­band upgrades for busi­ness to bene­fit from on the jus­ti­fic­a­tion the BBC has a web­site. There’s no reason to believe the Edu­ca­tion Tax will be used purely to pay for Higher Edu­ca­tion, nor that it will be lim­ited to uni­ver­sity degrees. Nick Clegg, whose Lib­eral Demo­crats are provid­ing the key votes to pass the tax could pledge that this is not going to hap­pen, but there’s a prob­lem with that. The gov­ern­ment is rely­ing to broken prom­ises to pass the tax. It seems reas­on­able to assume that broken prom­ises will also be a fea­ture of run­ning it.

What makes the situ­ation dire is there is no oppos­i­tion. The Labour Party was the party that gave us a Higher Edu­ca­tion min­is­ter that declared edu­ca­tion for education’s sake was “a bit dodgy”. They are also com­mit­ted to tax­ing the edu­cated, and if they were in power still it’s reas­on­able to assume that they would agree the bal­ance between nation and stu­dent fell entirely on the stu­dent. The Lib­eral Demo­crats were the only party to stand on a pro-education plat­form in the 2010 elec­tions. Yet des­pite prom­ising to abol­ish tuition fees, the Lib­eral Demo­crats have voted to triple fees. Stu­dents will leave with £50,000 debt (£100,000 per couple if the Con­ser­vat­ive party is still ser­i­ous about encour­aging young couples to marry). This is a debt that will grow and grow des­pite pay­ments under this scheme unless you earn more than £40,000. At the moment the gov­ern­ment has placed a 30 year limit on tax con­tri­bu­tions. When it’s clear that the edu­ca­tion sys­tem is still under­fun­ded, and politi­cians want to raise more tax money, can they really be trus­ted to hold to that?

See also:

Browne’s Gamble

The Eng­lish Inti­fada and the Human­it­ies Last Stand

This month I’ve mainly been working on Project SOAR

Alun Digital Academia, Life, Links, Science 2 Comments , , ,

Pro­ject SOAR is a rethink of what stu­dent read­ing lists mean. My con­tri­bu­tion to has been fid­dling with the code. Some of it has been adapt­ing the lay­out and some o it is behind the scenes like tying entries on books to other sites and plug­ging in the review sys­tem. It’s been a good pro­ject to work on. Partly because Alan Cann has inter­est­ing ideas about what can be done with read­ing lists. More prac­tic­ally he’s also been very clear on what he wants done with the site, so I’ve never felt like I’ve been aim­ing at a mov­ing target.

It’s also been very fast. My role was sched­uled to start Novem­ber 1. I actu­ally star­ted as soon as I heard fund­ing had been approved, but even so it’s been a short pro­ject with a clear goal. Because it’s his pro­ject, you can read more about it at his site.

Yesterday I celebrated having no money

Alun Politics 2 Comments ,

It was a big day for me yes­ter­day. My bank account finally reached £0. That’s no over­draft, no VISA bill and no stu­dent loan. Next month the bank will have to use black ink to print my balance.

This is an achieve­ment given I self-funded an MPhil and a PhD after my BA. If I’d paid what the gov­ern­ment said I should pay on my stu­dent loan then I’d still have most of it to pay off. For­tu­nately I’ve found the Stu­dent Loan Com­pany extraordin­ar­ily hard to talk to, hence the VISA and over­draft. It’s a worse rate of interest and it meant the bank phoning up every so often ask­ing “Where’s our money?”, but at least I felt they were tak­ing an interest. It’s been a big incent­ive to get it paid off.

Typical Students?

Stu­dents in the days when David Cameron was at university.

In future years this will seem quaint. The UK gov­ern­ment is set to impose fees of up to £9000 per year on stu­dents. To put this in con­text, around a dec­ade ago there were no fees, and the people impos­ing these fees had their uni­ver­sity edu­ca­tion paid for them by the state, along with a gen­er­ous grant for attend­ing uni­ver­sity as well as vari­ous bene­fits. There’s simply no way the aver­age par­ent of a child at school can pre­pare for these fees. If you can’t pay the fees up front you can pay them after. You’ll be charged above infla­tion for the loan, and if you pay off the loan early you’ll be hit with pen­alty charges, because the gov­ern­ment is using these extra pay­ments over the cost of the course to fund Higher Edu­ca­tion. Vince Cable hasn’t dwelled much on the import­ance of pen­al­ising people who pay off their debts, other than to say on BBC News, “It’s like a tax”. Actu­ally, with these pen­alty clauses, it’s gov­ern­ment redis­tri­bu­tion of wealth. It is a tax, at least for those who can’t afford to pay the huge fees.

It’ll also be a massive bur­den. Pay­ing these fees off will be the equi­val­ent of mak­ing the final pay­ment on your mortgage.

There’s lot to dis­like about the cuts, but the com­mon factor that really gets me down is that they’re presen­ted as mor­ally jus­ti­fied, as though these are exactly the sort of thing we should be doing any­way. The jus­ti­fic­a­tion for the cuts isn’t “Baby Boomers don’t want to pay tax at the same rate as their par­ents did”. It’s “The per­son who bene­fits should pay”. It’s hugely depress­ing that politi­cians on all sides of the house don’t believe that an edu­cated and informed elect­or­ate is an asset to the nation.

Distract yourself with free materials from the Open University

Alun Digital Academia, Life 5 Comments , ,

Via @skepticbarista I’ve found a col­lec­tion of Open Edu­ca­tional Resources from the Open Uni­ver­sity. They’re lis­ted at their Open Learn site, and there are stack of inter­est­ing courses to browse from Intro­duct­ory to Master’s level. There’s all sorts of things that make this inter­est­ing. There’s the vari­ety of the mater­ial from Aber­du­lais Falls (a case study in Welsh her­it­age) to Zoology. There’s the qual­ity of the mater­ial. There’s also the extra ele­ment. It might not be a taught course, but there’s still thought in how you can use the material.

There’s fora, learn­ing groups and a tool called FlashV­log for record­ing video diar­ies. That seems above and bey­ond the call of duty for OER mater­ial. The whole thing is CC licenced, so I had been think­ing about work­ing through a mod­ule here. The dif­fi­culty is that if you see the full list of courses, it’s a bit like being let loose in a sweet-shop.

Introducing Archaeopix Search

Alun Digital Academia, The Past 4 Comments , , , ,

I’ve been quiet recently as I’ve been work­ing on vari­ous things. One of them is now pub­lic and may be help­ful to edu­cat­ors and blog­gers. Tom Gos­kar and I have put together the site Archae­opix. The front of the site is a clear rip-off homage to Astro­nomy Pic­ture of the Day. I like that. It’s an excuse to say “Hey look at this thing!” and gen­er­ally be positive.

The clever bit is the search page.

Search­ing Flickr can be hit ‘n’ miss. Gen­er­ally if you want to use a photo for a blog or edu­ca­tional handout and you need it quickly, it needs to be licensed under a cre­at­ive com­mons licence. You can search on Flickr for cc-licensed pho­tos, but a search for “Rome” will bring up everything with Rome in it. Groups are handy because they’re themed. So you could search the Archae­ology group for Rome. The prob­lem then is that you’ll find a lot of ©opy­right pho­tos. You really need a group which is all cc-licensed. Chiron is a good example of that. How­ever Chiron’s strength is that it focuses on the clas­sical world, which means you won’t find pre­his­toric Europe in it, or any­thing Mayan. This is where Archae­opix search comes in.

Using this you can define what you want to use the photo for. You can spe­cify if you want to use the photo on a com­mer­cial site or if you want to be able to mess around with the image for a poster. You can then spe­cify which group you want to search in. The default is Archae­ology, but there’s oth­ers like Chiron, or South­west­ern Archae­ology. The search looks at the Flickr API, so that only pho­tos match­ing a suit­able licence turn up in the results.

It won’t turn all Flickr groups into Chiron clones, but it makes them more use­ful. If you’ve any sug­ges­tions on improv­ing the search leave me a com­ment below. Or you could just look at the Taj Mahal’s Evil Twin — which is today’s photo.

QR: A quick response

Alun Digital Academia No Comments ,

Yesterday’s QR work­shop was use­ful with some inter­est­ing ideas. Andy Rams­den has a blog post with ideas about the oppor­tun­it­ies and bar­ri­ers to QR we came up with. Most use­ful to me were the examples of where QR will not work. I was plan­ning to throw them every­where and see what stuck. Richard Mobbs gave a few few good reas­ons why this could be a bad idea. His group also came up with some wor­ries about secur­ity. It’s a prob­lem twice over.

One is that any URL is going to work best if it’s encoded as simply as pos­sible. That means using URL-shortening ser­vices which raises issues of trust. Usu­ally you don’t know where a tiny­url will lead. In the case of http://tinyurl.com/642wu3 it’s likely you do, which is why you won’t click the link. But on top of that the codes can be tampered with. This wouldn’t be by col­our­ing the blocks, but by repla­cing the codes completely.

qrcodes

One of these QR codes leads to a Leicester depart­mental web­site. The other is a Rick­roll. Can you tell which is which just by looking?

It’s a prob­lem if you’re doing an advert for Big Bank, and put a code on the poster. Someone else with a rip-off web­site can register bigbank-newaccounts.com and paste over the QR code with their own equally anonym­ous code. All those credit card details would be phished away. Back in the days when people trus­ted banks this would have been a ser­i­ous con­cern. I like one step made to tackle this by Bath. They have their own URL short­en­ing ser­vice, go.bath.ac.uk, which should make the codes used on their cam­pus rel­at­ively trust­worthy. If an non-bath.ac.uk URL is scanned then maybe you’d be con­cerned. In the wild I’m not so sure what safe­guards there are.

Another good point made by Alan Cann is that it’s not the code tech­no­logy that’s the prob­lem. It’s hav­ing the mater­ial in place to link to. A lot of mobile phone screens are much tinier than an iPhone, which means a uni­ver­sity would have to have a coher­ent mobile learn­ing strategy. Some of that could be simple enough. He’s sug­ges­ted that CSS could be a first step. If you browse my site on iPhone or Android you should see it looks quite dif­fer­ent, yet the alter­a­tions were pain­less. It also means think­ing hard about video and audio in being able to deliver them in mobile-friendly chunks. Data-plans are not all free.

It’s not so much the codes, as this new atti­tude to mater­ial which could be as import­ant to the devel­op­ment of the mobile inter­net as access to the hard­ware. QR would then be part of the glue that links hard­ware to mobile con­tent and the real world to the internet.

The single person problem

Alun Digital Academia 1 Comment , , , ,

Is it pos­sible that one per­son just being them­selves could make a social site so unwel­com­ing that you’d avoid recom­mend­ing its use?

This isn’t just about tol­er­ance of trolls. It’s about whether or not social sites are usable in an edu­ca­tional con­text. I’ll give an example.

I’d like to include video on the next Integ­rated Sci­ences web­site. Spe­cific­ally I’d like to be able to include video con­ver­sa­tion, so that people could ask ques­tions and these would appear on site. See­smic would seem to be a good idea for that. Except there’s no way I’d use See­smic because of Under­pants Guy, a man who likes to pon­ti­fic­ate with lib­eral use of swear words in his under­pants. There’s plenty of him to see. Now sup­pose this self-proclaimed troll moves into this con­ver­sa­tion thread, what can be done? On See­smic, noth­ing. Even if there could be, I’m not sure that flag­ging his com­ments for being inap­pro­pri­ate for an edu­ca­tional site would be entirely fair. See­smic is not my site, there­fore I’m not in a pos­i­tion to insist on a dress code or use of lan­guage. It’s a social site. For this reason Phreadz, with its own lib­eral use of lan­guage isn’t suit­able either.

Phreadz will have the option of cre­at­ing a closed site, which would solve the prob­lem. Unfor­tu­nately there’s no way ISciences will be able to afford it, if it’s sens­ibly priced. Also if the site is closed, very few stu­dents will use it. It has to be open and there­fore we have the troll prob­lem again. Again I can’t insist that IScience lays down the beha­viour rules, and with Phreadz being social I think it would be a very bad idea if it did happen.

I’m now think­ing that while fol­low­ing the stu­dents and using the tools they use is a good idea, pro­act­ively lead­ing it opens up too many prob­lems to make sense. There can be grief on Twit­ter or Face­book, but if it’s some­where where the stu­dents are lead­ing then per­haps that’s less of a problem.

*While flag­ging him for use of lan­guage for purely social reas­ons would be no prob­lem at all. I sus­pect if that actu­ally happened many social sites would col­lapse under the admin strain.

Photo of pants (cc) ZeeP­ack.

Egad! It’s the Times Higher Education Supplement

Alun Life 1 Comment , , ,

…or as it’s now named Times Higher Edu­ca­tion. If you’re look­ing for the re-launched THES the you may find it’s moved loc­a­tion in the paper shop. Rather than being stuffed next to the TES and TLS, I found it next to New Sci­ent­ist, BBC His­tory magazine and those strange magazines with head­lines like “Inside the Asian Tiger” which are full of pic­tures of sky­scrapers instead of big cats. It’s re-sized with a shi­nier cover but they’ve kept the ink which sticks to your fin­gers if you hold it. My atti­tude to the shift from paper to magazine is neut­ral — it’s still a good read. The web­site how­ever is much better.

There’s usu­ally some­thing to com­ment on in the THES THE. The prob­lem has been that the web­site has been emphat­ic­ally sub­scrip­tion only which makes link­ing to it a bit point­less. Repro­du­cing the basic story would also be a chore, as well as bad thing to do from a copy­right per­spect­ive. That’s changed.

From the week the news stor­ies and archives of THES/THE are open. This means I can link to cur­rent stor­ies like the ongo­ing prob­lems with the RAE as well as the really good opin­ion pieces which are pub­lished, like Susan Bassnett’s Shrink­ing Volumes. I can also link to the book reviews. Simon Goldhill’s review of James Davidson’s latest book is a must read if you have an interest in Greek sex, which com­ple­ments Tony Keen’s com­ments about the book on his web­log. With the archive being open too there’s the oppor­tun­ity to revisit some older argu­ments. As an example here’s a book review I might be inter­ested in.

At a stroke I think THE has become a lot more use­ful. Free access to its cov­er­age of higher edu­ca­tion will improve its prestige inter­na­tion­ally. I’ll be able to share good bits from Laurie Taylor’s column. It’s good news.

And max­imum joy! I’ve just real­ised I can link to Daniel Lord Smail’s art­icle on Deep His­tory so you can see what he’s writ­ten for yourself.

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