Guardian on UK University funding, nothing about e-learning #crossmedia12
This is a bit off-topic for Cross Media Live but not by much. Print culture has a lot more influence than many people realise. The idea of a university in a specific location has a lot to do with print equipment. And law of course. It was once illegal to print anything in the UK except in London, Oxford or Cambridge.
Today the Guardian in print (Education towards the back) has a couple of stories about funding
I think there is a bit of a slant from the way the Ikea photo is presented. Presumably the editor believes that most readers prefer the existing architecture on UK sites. Somehow a campus set up somewhere else is not as solid. There could have been a photo of a pop-up yurt as shown at Olympia during Learning Without Frontiers
But there is nothing about the web at all. Maybe this is just the view of Guardian print journalists. Or maybe it reflects the views of the UK academics quoted in the text. In another article Peter Scott writes about neoliberal triumph and market forces. This is the context often presented for the online offers available from other sources. A recent Guardian story questioned the role of Pearson. But it seems to me that commercial solutions for e-learning are gaining attention in the absence of much else from the existing UK universities.
I expect the next sensible Guardian journalism about the web and universities to be in a special pull-out section sponsored by Stanford and MIT.
Meanwhile in Exeter the Central Library will be closed for a year or so while the building is improved and we get another cafe in the city centre. Architecture continues as a central feature for most sites. The university forum still has no bookshop but the students seem unconcerned. This may be because they are away. Will the student union newspaper report any new campaigns when the term begins?