According to the Times Higher Education supplement, the downturn in global economies is about to have the unfortunate knock-on effect on Universities, they’re going bust!

In today’s article “I’m afraid it’s very bad news” the news isn’t good for staff and students in a reported 30 Higher Education institutions could go under next year.

Whilst the Times article is based on a report from the accounting firm Grant Thorton, and therefore ignores many of the larger and wider implications this will have to staff and students, the Times has concentrated on the discussions on staff pay.

It is disturbing that one avenue open to UK HE Institution, and being offered as a (temporary?) solution is to accept more overseas students in favour of home-grown talent, and quite rightly “inadvertently fuelling xenophobia” that is already simmering under the surface.

What is also disturbing is that the recommendations are that universities “put business interests first, ahead of the core activities of research and teaching, and shunting the academics aside”. This could be extremely costly as at Bournemouth and other ‘new’ Universities, the transition to modern research-led Institution is already well under way.

“Unfortunately, it seems, our institutions make very poor patients: too complex and too slow to be able to respond quickly to a turn for the worse.”

Interestingly enough, you ought to read this other Times HE article, “Change or perish, institutions told“, where there is more information about just what Grant Thorton advised the Times on the “series of financial hurdles that universities must clear”, these being;

• cuts to government funding
• the growing burden of debt repayments
• pension and pay commitments
• a potential drop in international and domestic student numbers

It seems education is not the safest place to work out a recession anymore.

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“I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”

www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

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Blogging is not necessarily to every ones taste, but is certainly one way that people are communicating and learning.

Blogging was originally the domain of net-geeks and technically-capable programmers and developers in the late-1990′s, and is from the term “web-log” (now ‘blog’).

But this is not about blogging, or about learning about blogging, rather this is about learning and I am merely using a blog as the ‘tool’. As a graduate from University in 1996 I was fortunate to have the growing Internet at my disposal for research and referencing, yet current students and learners have so much more available that wasn’t available for me; Google, eBooks, eJournals, Web 2.0, etc, etc.

Does this make it better or easier for them to learn? Probably not. It just means there is so much more available, possibly more inappropriate than I had to deal with 12+ years ago, and they have to read and sift through all this before they get to the relevant and appropriate content.

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