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Election promises...?

Tomorrow’s finally election election day (an event that seems to have been coming since May 2009) and we know that whoever gets into power will have some very difficult decisions to make. None of the three parties have really told us were the money’s going to come from or the cuts are going to be made, but here are my predictions:

  1. There will be a hung parliament … I’m hoping that it will be lib-lab ruling coalition, but fear a lib-con one.
  2. VAT will definitely be raised. There’s no way to avoid it because the deficit cannot be removed without raising some income. In Germany, VAT is 22% I believe.
  3. Expect University tuition fees to rise. The long awaited Browne report will be published after the election because I’m sure that no party really wanted tuition fees to be on the agenda. Probably won’t be a US style free market, but expect the sight of 100 vice chancellors wriggling to price their institutions’ offerings in the “Ivy league” even if they haven’t the research base or teaching excellence to warrant it.
  4. While more expensive courses for home students puts pressure on home student recruitment, and possibly tempers demand from the working and lower middle classes, expect even more draconian visa conditions being front-loaded on oversees students by the border agency in the name of immigration control.
  5. Given the triple whammy of lower demand from both home and oversees students, and the £1 billion reduction in central funding, there will have to be some serious reduction in staffing at Universities. Despite the rhetoric about protecting front-line services (not promised for HE please note) the axe will inevitably fall on teaching staff putting more pressure on staff-student ratios and seriously impacting the so-called “student experience”.
  6. We might get some form of proportional representation, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

One thing is sure, pain is coming and this Cassandra fears what’s hiding behind the meager gifts being offered by Brown, Clegg and Cameron.

There’s more Cassandra from Jonathan Friedland in today’s Guardian Comment.

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This week ...

… I’ve been mostly

  • developing a new version of my project allocation tool in Drupal (permissions, CCK and views,.. oh my!);
  • re-launching the annual research project selection round in Blackboard; and
  • re-launching Social Engineering as a self-hosted Elgg site.

In the meantime, last-year’s research projects have been winding down (submission deadline was yesterday and vivas are in two-weeks), and we’ve been winding up to asking colleagues for the 500 or so new projects we are going to need for 2010-2011.

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A Beginner's Guide to Social Engineering

Today I presented a “Lunch and Learn Session” to colleagues at our Staff Development Unit. Here are the slides which are hosted at Google Docs.

[googleapps domain="docs" dir="present/embed" query="id=ajggj8h93vqb_20130gsvxt3fw" width="410" height="342" /]

The creation of a Ning network was a highlight of the session, and unfortunately that bit is not present here, but the *intro* and *outro* may nevertheless be of some interest.

There is also a SlideShare version which includes some extra video which I may get around to narrating and including a screencast demo of Ning site creation. Watch this space!

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Digital Economy Bill

The Digital Economy Bill was pushed through parliament last night despite the attempts of MPs on the Labour and Liberal Democrat benches to force it to be delayed for proper scrutiny until after the next election.

It’s apparently not a big issue in the electoral coverage and at the time of posting there had only been four reactions in the *blogs* of mainstream media:

- Charles Arthur, Guardian Technology Editor, live blogged the whole debate and then summarised in “Digital economy bill rushed through wash-up in late night session“. - The BBC News site posted initial reaction “Anger about ‘Digital Stitch-Up’” which includes recording of the whole 264 minute debate. - Mike Butcher of the Telegraph posted The Digital Economy Bill: a nightmare of unintended consequences. - James Graham in *Comment is Free* on the Guardian reacts to the debate with an opinion piece Digital economy bill exposed broken system that calls for a reform of Parliament and a vote for the Liberal Democrats (hardly non-partisan then!) We will have to wait until Friday’s papers to read more considered coverage of the implications of this, but I fear that Government has legislated in haste, and we will have to repent at leisure.

More reactions from Google’s Realtime Search, the excellent Guardian Web Technology site. My MP didn’t attent for the debate or the vote (even though I emailed him about it) and there was a very distinct difference between the social media’s response to this issue and that of our representative democracy.

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It's its not it's

Just posted my last post and I noticed that I’d typed it’s when I meant its. This is a common error that I pick up my students on all the time, but it’s one that I make myself quite frequently.

Its is the possessive adjective form of the pronoun *it* used in the post in question as “YouTube has changed **its** user interface”. It’s is a contraction of *it is* as used in “*First impressions*: **it’s** [that is YouTube’s new interface *is*] certainly much less cluttered”.

Student beware: this type of error won’t be picked up with a spell checker … it might be picked up by a grammar checker … but don’t count on it. Since *its* is actually quite rare, as things don’t usually possess other things, it’s probably *it’s* that you want. But if you are unsure, ask yourself “is it its or is or is it it is?”

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