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.

Today was the day I finally got to speak to the submission on the Copyright (New Technologies and Performers' Rights) Amendment Bill before the Commerce Select Committee.

I'm doing a lot of reading about organisational change and the role of the university at the moment and the juxtaposition of two quotes struck me rather strongly.

Burton Clark in 1998, in his book "Creating Entrepenurial Universities" quoted a very apt observation:

"a workable twentieth century definition of institutional autonomy [is] the absence of dependence upon a single or narrow base of support" (Babbage and Rosenweig, 1962, quoted in Clark, 1998, p7)

One of the very real challenges to New Zealand universities is our dependence on the Government for our funding. A large proportion of most universities budgets come from a traditional model of funding that is built primarily around our teaching activities.

I'm working my way through some papers on organisational change at the moment (writing a paper, which is why this blog has been a bit quiet) and as a molecular biologist by training I'm finding the (mis)use of the word "evolution" extremely irritating.