George Santayana's quote 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it' is familiar to many, as in the tale of Cassandra, princess of Troy, and doomed to foretell the future and never be believed. Recent events affecting Kindle owners make me think that Richard Stallman and Clifford Lynch must be feeling increasingly like Cassandra.

My dislike of ranking lists of educational institutions has undoubtedly been apparent in other posts I've made and in the design philosophy underpinning the eMM. An example of why I take this position is rather clearly shown in the recent comments on the U.S. News and World Report rankings and the extent some institutions may go to influence their position on the list.

The eMM is still actively being applied down here in Australasia with projects following up on the ITP sector assessments and with ACODE applying the eMM in large Australian institutions. I also just spent last week in Perth presenting on some ideas for relating eMM assessment results to institutional frameworks and priorities (I'll post the link to the paper as soon as its online, you can find the abstract on the conference site at the moment). Paul Basich has also drawn my attention to the recent publication of the University of London eMM report, an extensive document that contains some very useful observations as well as a positive endorsement of their use of the model. I thought however, that I'd talk about some of the work that others are doing with model. These are projects and papers that I'm completely uninvolved with. Its great to see others taking the ideas and making them their own.

Years ago, while I was working for the IT group at Victoria I very nearly lost control at a co-worker (I refuse to describe him as a colleague). The idiot thought that it would be a good idea for the University to track people visiting our website and then, based on the pages they visited, spam them with targeted marketing. He failed to appreciate that many people would regard this as a gross violation of privacy and an abuse of our role as an information provider and educator. Luckily for Victoria, he soon left, sadly for Waikato University, they seem to have an idiot all of their own.

Section 92A of the New Zealand Copyright Act has been in the media quite a lot recently, the work of the Creative Freedom Foundation has been excellent in promoting the concerns of a wide range of New Zealanders over the serious risks to personal freedoms and citizenship reflected in this badly written and sycophantic legislation. Some day I very much hope that some sunshine will fall on why the previous Minister Judith Tizard saw fit to ignore the recommendation of the Commerce Select Committee and reinsert an obviously broken and excessive piece of law. The idea that a Minister of the Crown thinks that "deliberately vague" law is in the interests of New Zealand speaks volumes in itself. Three areas, however, don't seem to have been addressed at much depth. These include the risk to modern citizenship reflected in this law, and the real risk to schools, universities, and other educational institutions.

The second half of 2008 has been a busy time. A combination of work pressures and a lot of behind the scenes work on the eMM has meant I've let this blog lapse badly. At the moment I'm sitting waiting for the last keynote at the SLOAN ALN conference in Florida having given a presentation on the eMM to a US audience, and I'm getting ready to fly out this afternoon to visit the folk at NIME in Japan, sharing the eMM with Japanese colleagues.

Funny the little coincidences. After posting about Digital Natives on Saturday I was catching up on some reading and I encountered an article in last April's Communications of the ACM (yes I know, I really behind on my reading...). Inconsistencies and Disconnects by Jeffrey Stone and Elinor Madigan examines the issue of student information technology skills, and more importantly the disconnect between student perceptions of their skills and reality.

A meme that I have found particularly irritating in recent years is the myth popularised by Marc Prensky that children who have grown up in the last decade or so - the Millenials - are somehow inherently more gifted and competent in the fluent use of technology, Digital Natives. And that the rest of us are Digital Immigrants - strangers in the strange land of the Internet and technology.

Nothing lasts forever - and Variety are drawing our attention once again to the fact that this is more true now than ever. They're talking about movies, a colleague at VUW is concerned about multimedia and I keep thinking about all that teaching and research data my colleagues keep on hard drives and CDs in the belief that they have permanently stored it.

Last century, in the eighties, and in a climate of public sector accountability driven by Thatcherism the British Government imposed a series of performance indicators upon the UK university sector. The goal was improved efficiency and quality, but the clear message was that the universities had to held accountable to the government, as representatives of the public and primary funders of the universities.