When I started Fortnightly Mailing it was a genuine fortnightly newsletter, and hand coded at that. (Here is Number 8 from 8 years ago.) Four years later I started publishing Fortnightly Mailing using Typepad, with subscribers receiving a regular email of links to individual posts.
Gradually the availability of other tools and the (nasty) "snippetisation" of discourse on the Internet has got in the way of this process. Things I might in the past have written about properly, I now comment on much more briefly using FriendFeed: the barriers to writing "properly" seem to have grown, and those like Stephen Downes, Clive Shepherd, Cath Ellis, David Jennings and Donald Clark who are managing to "keep up proper writing" seem particularly admirable. However, there remains something to be said for snippets, and I hope that these from the last seven weeks will be of genuine interest.
1: "The Internet Problem: when an abundance of choice becomes an issue." A to-the-point piece by Cory Doctorow in the Guardian.
http://ff.im/voy82
2: Breathtaking, almost. The US Government's "Open Government Initiative" provides a process template that a lot of others could use.
http://ff.im/voz7w
3: David Campbell's Photography Multimedia Politics is a blog that "analyzes how documentary photography and photojournalism works".
http://ff.im/vcRot
4: Tuition fees, markets, and inequality. Salford's VC Martin Hall analyses the new system approved by Parliament, which, he says, should properly be described as a “minimum threshold, time limited graduate contribution system”.
http://ff.im/v8VSR
5: Many Eyes - a promising looking IBM data visualisation tool/environment.
http://ff.im/v3JHJ
6: "Doc note: I dissent. A fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod." Obituary of mathematician Peter Hilton, Bletchley Park code-breaker, who died on 6 November.
http://ff.im/uYANo
7: Travelling into the wind, powered by the wind, at three times the speed of the wind.
http://ff.im/uHnht
8: Submission fees in scholarly (and potentially Open Access) publishing - interesting piece by Mark Ware for the JISC-supported Knowledge Exchange.
http://ff.im/uGgpW
9: The Chinese Top Level Quality Project "a large project in Chinese higher education which uses the production of Open Educational Resources to improve the quality of undergraduate education", by Stian Håklev.
http://ff.im/uDDvx
10: Ars Technica - Adam Stevenon - The economic case for open access in academic publishing.
http://ff.im/uv0r7
11: Making "data-based instructional decisions". Rupert Murdoch's News Corp moves into education, buying 90% of Wireless Generation.
http://ff.im/urX8v
12: "In the past, the KGB resorted to torture to learn of connections between activists. Today, they simply need to get on Facebook." James Harkin's "Cyber-Con" in the London Review of Books.
http://ff.im/uq8jW
13: Why Ed Miliband is not wrong to talk about the "squeezed middle". Nick Cohen in the Spectator.
http://ff.im/upWO7
14: Interesting interview by David Jennings with Ollie Nørsterud Gardener about recognising individuality in enterprise learning.
http://ff.im/ukmCF
15: Caroline Sutton's "presidential" keynote at the Open Access Scholarly Publishers' Association in 2010.
http://ff.im/ujSzv
16: US dollar-millionaires call on the Barack Obama to let tax-cuts lapse. [He did not....]
http://ff.im/ugDkl
17: Review of DirectGov for the Cabinet Office by Martha Lane Fox.
http://ff.im/udfHG
18: "Get ahead" - a promising tie-up between the University of Salford, The Manchester College, Trafford College, and Salford City College, that helps FE students find out more about studying in university from "real" students.
http://ff.im/u9Qka
19: Senior managers in education: "That felt like being in a room with a bunch of record company executives in 1999." Two long and carefully made write-ups of interviews by David Jennings.
http://ff.im/tYQLv
20: UK Government ignores 'net neutrality'. Report in The Register by Chris Williams.
http://ff.im/tWZMG
21: "The production and management of evidence for public service reform" by surgeon Jonathan Shepherd argues strongly for stronger and more systematic connections between the research system and the public services.
http://ff.im/tPo8q
22: "In the Facebook internet, everyone knows exactly what breed of dog you are." Piece from Wired that highlights difference between Facebook's and Google's use of personal information.
http://ff.im/tIVUE
23: How will cultural data be preserved? And by whom? In 2005 I heard this talk about the data deluge by Cliff Lynch, and it still sounds fresh.
http://ff.im/tH41S
24: Kabir Chibber's "Online education disrupting traditional academic models" describes the wholly online Applied Engineering and Technology Library at the University of Texas.
http://ff.im/tC1Ri
25: The video of Sudhir Giri of Google's "Developing a Learning Ecosystem" from ALT-C 2010 is finally published on the ALT YouTube Channel.
http://ff.im/tw4Qx
26: Most users of Creative Commons use the "wrong licence". A paper by Derek Keats which summarises some principle-based guidelines for choosing between Creative Commons licenses.
http://ff.im/tnFKE
27: Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research", by Yassine Gargouri, Chawki Hajjem, Vincent Larivière, Yves Gingras, Les Carr, Tim Brody, Stevan Harnad.
http://ff.im/tbffi
28: Browne's Gamble - Stefan Collini's trenchant and sensibly selective critique of the Browne Report in the LRB.
http://ff.im/sWMun
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