Although I'm not universally convinced by claims of grade inflation (and have written about the examination system over at the Guardian ), I do welcome some attempt to differentiate examination grades. There is no point in having an examination system that yields a homogeneous result, or has boundaries that are overly broad. That said, the manner in which Gove has set about regulating this is abhorrent, for several reasons.

I've been mightily impressed by the role of crowdfunding solutions in recent days. I think it's great that these projects allow initiatives to get off the ground via people who like what's being proposed. I was particularly interested, though, in app.net's approach. App.net, for those who don't know, is an attempt to re-make Twitter, but with open API access and no advertising.

At the risk of more meta, I wanted to jot down a few thoughts on blogs in scholarly research. Sarah Quinnell recently wrote a post on the LSE impact blog, following up on her Guardian post that "[blogs are increasingly recognised as a legitimate academic output". I want to consider some of the problems here, but not from the perspective of content.

Last night, as I was heading to bed, a guy called Mark Kohut, whom I know from various Pynchon-interest intersections, published a copy of a letter he was planning to send to the New York Times.

Yet again a certain group of people are being screwed over... guess who? That's right! The people who paid tuition fees to go to university and are now trying to get their first academic post. UCL just advertised for 3 unpaid full-time "internships" that required specialist scientific knowledge and, in essence, amounts to offloading the work that's tedious onto young researchers.

News of the Bodleian's plans to digitise the First Folio are to be welcomed, but several passages in this article made me question the purpose of indefinite preservation of this object... especially once that digitisation is complete. First off, there's the resources question. Consider a parallel to the outspoken view of Chris Packham on the conservation of pandas: In this case, we place a very high social value on the item in question.

Walking down my usual route to the British Library today, I encountered one of the most flagrant attempts to normalize the commodification of Higher Education that I have yet seen. In a poster for The British Institute of Technology &

Kent Anderson recently wrote a post over at Scholarly Kitchen entitled "A Proposed List — 60 Things Journal Publishers Do". I think this list needs a little mythbusting: I agree with some of the points, think others need qualifying and that others are just hands-down false. So here's my rundown: I also want to add a qualifier: "things publishers do" isn't really good enough.

This is just a quick post about my experience of submitting a Ph.D. having worked full-time on it previously since October 2009. It's odd. During the Ph.D. I wrote several articles for journals and book chapters concurrently (ie. that were nothing to do with my Ph.D. work). Now I'm awaiting a viva it suddenly feels a great deal harder to undertake exactly the same exercise, even though I have a great deal more time.

I've had several conversations in the past few weeks on the different modes of dissemination and the REF's undervaluation of the book collection. The argument goes that essays in a book collection are less valued because they're not peer reviewed. Except... they are. They're just not shipped out by an editor of a journal to multiple experts to formulate consensus. In some ways, the edited collection is reviewed to a greater extent.

After the excellent, "What Happens Now" 21st-century fiction conference, I thought it would be worthwhile sharing the Prezi that I created, in case it's of any interest: .prezi-player { width: 750px; } .prezi-player-links { text-align: center;