This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full personal ( not institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to refine this.

Over the holiday period I wanted to visualize the differences between two editions of a text that I had found to be very different (more on this in the new year). I couldn’t find a ready-made solution, so I put together a small piece of software to achieve this: SankeyVariant.

This year was a good year for me in terms of academia. I started my job as a Senior Lecturer at Birkbeck, I launched the Open Library of Humanities with a substantial Mellon grant, and I finished writing two books that I hope will be published next year ( Password and The Anxiety of Academia ). I also began supervising some really great Ph.D. students, including Stuart Lawson on the politics of open access.

This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full personal ( not institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to refine this. The Green Paper asks in Question 22: a.) Beyond the broader objections I have to many elements of the Paper, which these powers are supposed to implement, the powers are too broadly defined.

Let’sEncrypt is a brilliant new service that aims to bring mass-scale SSL, free-of-charge to the wide web. It’s in beta at the moment but it works pretty well.

This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full personal ( not institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to refine this. The Green Paper asks in Question 20: Provisional response: None should be taken. The government should leave well alone here.

This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full personal ( not institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to refine this. The Green Paper asks in Question 21: Provisional response: a.) Although I agree with many of the duties and powers of a proposed Office for Students, there are several problems with the proposed duties and powers of the OfS.

This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full personal ( not institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to refine this.

This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full personal ( not institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to refine this. The Green Paper asks in Question 18: Provisional response: a.) The proposed changes to the HE architecture strike me as an expensive exercise in re-branding. There does not seem to be any function in the existing system that is not needed in the new setup.

This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full personal ( not institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to refine this. The Green Paper asks in Question 17: Provisional response: I agree in part with the proposal to introduce a requirement for all providers to have contingency arrangements to support students in the event that their course cannot be completed.