This blog is constructed using 100% recycled electrons.

Just thought you’d like to know.

My mate Dave Briggs has an interesting blog post about the reasons why public-sector organisations refuse to allow their staffs to access the ‘normal’ Internet. Dave spends a lot of time in these organisations and knows them well. He has identified three different types of explanation.

1. Staff will waste time

“This” says Dave, “is a management issue and not a technology one. If people want to waste time, they’ll find a way; and every organisation already has policy and process to manage this and stop it happening”.

2. Information security and risk of virus infection etc

Dave sees two parts to this.

Firstly that using social web sites, whether for communication or collaboration, increases the likelihood of losing sensitive information. I’ve heard of people in councils being blocked from Slideshare for this very reason. Imagine that! Someone accidentally creating a powerpoint deck full of confidential data, and then deciding that they should publish it publicly on Slideshare!

This is unfathomably moronic, not least because of course there have been far more instances of people losing or leaking paper files, and nobody as far as I am aware has banned the use of those. It’s an education thing, innit?

Likewise the virus issue. People clicking dodgy links is the main problem here, and that’s as likely to happen via email as anything else. Nobody blocks email (shame). Instead, educate people not to click dodgy links. Easy.

Finally, he comes to what he thinks is the real reason:

3. The pipe isn’t big enough

“I have had lots of conversations with IT folk in public sector organisations”, he writes, “who simply state that if someone in the organisation watches a video on YouTube, then that’s the network down for pretty much everyone else”.

I can’t help but think that this is one of the main reasons behind organisations blocking access to interesting websites. Perhaps the other two reasons are just covering up the fact that many government organisations have infrastructure that really isn’t fit for purpose?

Yep.

Autumn Rose, originally uploaded by jjn1.

Larger size here.

There’s an interesting piece in Times Higher Education under the headline “Universities are blind to open-learning train set to smash up their models”. It’s a report on a OECD conference held last week in Paris.

Open learning and new technology are about to smash the structure of the modern university – and higher education is too distracted by its funding problems to notice.

Peter Smith, the senior vice-president of academic strategies and development for private US firm Kaplan Higher Education, said online access to university courses would end the model of higher education based on ‘scarcity’ of places.

“Faculty and people who run universities are no longer in control,” he told an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development conference in Paris last week.

Dr Smith, a former assistant director general for education at Unesco, the UN cultural and educational body, challenged the focus on the financial crisis at the event, titled Higher Education in a World Changed Utterly: Doing More with Less.

Given huge growth in access to information, Dr Smith argued, the real challenge facing universities is “doing more with more”. He added: “The only ‘less’ is the resources available to traditional universities to do what they have always done.”

In another speech, Charles Reed, the chancellor of the California State University system, likened higher education to a train, with more people seeking to cram into limited places as the financial crisis squeezed jobs.

Dr Smith adapted the metaphor. “The train is headed directly at the modern university structure,” he said. “It is going to hit it, and change it fundamentally.”

Dr Smith said he could, for example, take Carnegie Mellon University’s open-learning courses on Apple iTunes, develop a system of mentors and use the OECD’s measures to evaluate student performance on graduation (the Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes project).

This would give “all of the resources you need for an excellent educational experience” at a low cost, he argued.

What’s interesting about this is its implicit short-termism. There’s no doubt that it can be done — and probably is being done. Leaving aside the question of whether there is an important — but intangible — value to be derived from physically gathering young people in one place so that they can learn from one another as well as from their ‘instructors’ (a hoary old question, this, first raised by Eli Noam in 1995), this view of education seems to me to be irredeemably flawed. The whole point of academic teaching is that, over time, it needs to be refreshed, updated, renewed — and in some cases overthrown by new paradigms and new knowledge. Building a degree-awarding industry on the back of open content provided by established institutions can indeed be done. But it contributes nothing to the process of academic renewal that comes mainly from employing, supporting and rewarding academic staff. In that sense, Smith’s idea of re-using CMU material looks awfully like the slash-and-burn approach to agriculture that is devastating the world’s rain-forests. In the short-term, the cleared forest soil is fertile and productive. But if it’s not fertilised and tilled it will rapidly become exhausted.

LATER: In a tweet, Jeff Jarvis pointed out, reasonably, that Dr Smith was proposing to add some value (mentors, etc.). But that still doesn’t address the issue of who generates — and refreshes — the teaching material. I suppose it’s possible in some cases that the act of exposing teaching materials to a wide audience could lead to an open-source-type tinkering, bug-fixing improvement process.

From The Register.

On Wednesday, 6 October, we reported that a Wikipedia admin, RodHullandEmu, had added erroneous information to the Wikipedia entry on Norman Wisdom. In a revised version of the story we reported that RodHullandEmu had not added the erroneous information, but had "preserved" it. We accept that both of these statements are incorrect, and apologise for any inconvenience or embarrassment caused.

Curiouser and curiouser.

The Daily Mail’s secret concept-map. By thePoke.

The ‘Lines’ are:

Thanks to Ian Yorston for the link.

Tilly, originally uploaded by jjn1.

One of our cats. She always looks reproachful, so that one wonders what one would have to do to earn her approval. As PG Wodehouse observed, cats’ haughty demeanour derives from the fact that they know that the ancient Egyptians worshipped them as gods.

Jeff Jarvis has been to see ‘The Social Network’. He didn’t like it. Here he explains why.

The Social Network is the anti-social movie. It distrusts and makes no effort to understand the phenomenon right in front of its nose. It disapproves—as media people, old and neonew, do—of rabblerous or drunk or drugged-up or oversexed masses doing what they do. Ah, but its fans will say, it’s really just a drama about a man. But that’s where it fails most. It can’t begin to explain this man because it doesn’t grok what he made—what he’s still making “We don’t even know what it is yet,” Zuckerberg says in the movie, “It’s never finished”.

The Social Network is the anti-geek movie. It is the story that those who resist the change society is undergoing want to see. It says the internet is not a revolution but only the creation of a few odd, machine-men, the boys we didn’t like in college. The Social Network is the revenge on the revenge of the nerds…

Bang on cue, here’s the WSJ [old media] piling in to make Jeff’s point. The paper just loves the movie. “The film’s substance”, it gushes,

lies mainly in its convoluted tale of vast ambition—an ambition oddly disconnected, in Mr. Zuckerberg’s case, from a desire to make money—spectacular success and bitter betrayal. Not since “Apollo 13” has a mainstream motion picture conveyed so much factual as well as dramatic information with such clarity and agility. First Mark moves beyond—or pilfers the intellectual property of—three upperclassmen who’d approached him for help on a website they called Harvard Connection. Later the newly-minted young magnate has a painful falling out with Facebook’s original business manager, Eduardo Saverin: he’s played with great subtlety and rueful charm by Andrew Garfield, who’ll be seen as Peter Parker in the next “Spider-Man.” While the movie’s prevailing mood is excitation—hardly a moment goes by when someone isn’t having a brilliant idea—its dominant mode is litigation, thanks to one suit on behalf of those Harvard upperclassmen, and another brought by Eduardo.

Dave Winer went to see the film. His typically sensible notes are here.

… as Dorothy Parker observed in reviewing Christopher Isherwood’s play I am a Camera.

This latest nonsense (a ‘skin’ for the iPhone 4) presumeably stems from Steve Jobs’s throwaway remark, when launching the phone, that the device felt “like a Leica”.

You can buy one here if you insist.

The September 6 edition of the New Yorker has a lovely piece (sadly, behind a paywall) by John McPhee about this year’s British Open, which was played on the Old Course at St Andrews. At one point, McPhee walked the course with David Hamilton, a noted golf historian, who drew attention to

certain “Presbyterian features” of the course — the Valley of Sin, the Pulpit bunker, the bunker named Hell — pointing them out as we passed them. St Andrews’ pot bunkers are nothing like the scalloped sands of other courses. The many dozens of them on the Old Course are small, cylindrical, scarcely wider than a golf swing, and of varying depth — four feet, six feet, but always enough to retain a few strokes. Their faces are vertical, layered, stratigraphic walls of ancestral turf. As you look down a fairway, they suggest the mouths of small caves, or, collectively, the sharp perforations of a kitchen grater. On the sixteenth, he called attention to a pair of them in mid-fairway, only a yard or two apart, with a mound between them that suggested cartilage. The name of this hazard is the Principal’s Nose. Hamilton told a joke about a local man playing the course, who suffered a seizure at the Principal’s Nose. His playing partner called 999, the UK version of 911, and was soon speaking with a person in Bangalore. The playing partner reported the seizure and said that the victim was at the Principal’s Nose bunker on the sixteenth hole on the Old Course at St Andrews, in Scotland; and Bangalore asked, “Which nostril?”

It’s a lovely piece, in all kinds of ways. And very good on the touchy subject of the seventeenth hole, which is almost as fiendish as the fifth in Lahinch.