HACkers blog

Today is Blog Day, which - given that this is allegedly the 10th anniversary of the invention of the blog - warrants due deference and respectful observation.

Blog Day is traditionally marked by linking to five blogs which step outside one's comfort zone - the kind of blogs one would not normally blogroll - and advising the bloggers of your linking of them.

The blogs I've selected to link for this year's blog day are thus:

Boing Boing is "a weblog of cultural curiosities and interesting technologies. It's the most popular blog in the world, as ranked by Technorati.com, and won the Lifetime Achievement and Best Group Blog awards at the 2006 Bloggies ceremony."

Bullog at the Times is Dave Bullard (yes, the infamous blog-hater)'s blog. Yes, I know real bloggers are supposed to hate him, but jeez guys, get a sense of humour! If your identity is that easily threatened by what someone writes, you might want to try a spot of counselling?

Lifehacker offers "tips and downloads for getting things done". Some of the links are actually useful, but it's a great way to waste bandwidth if you're in need of a spot of wilfing.

The South African Insult is irreverent, eclectic and educational in a way you might perhaps not want. Worth reading, then.

Thought Leader is the Mail&Guardian's OpEd blogspace. It lacks the dynamism, community and - dare I say - intelligence of the Guardian's Comment is Free, but it's early days yet and it may yet develop into something equivalently engaging.

Some time back I blogged about the map of naked black "savages" in the Law building, so stark among all the staid suited-and-tied white men in all the photographs on all the other walls.

Earlier I happened to be down at Kramer, and couldn't resist going up to Level 5 to see if it was still there. It is.

So, for those who've always wondered who the role models for our black law students are:

 

 

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The statement issued by the South African National Editors' Forum (Sanef) drew on the right of the public to know, in defence of media publishing allegations they believed to be true where they deemed it to be in the public's interested to know.

With that in mind, herewith a rather sweet contribution:

Colleagues tell me that the new offices - constructed out of old offices, only more and smaller - in the Leslie Commerce Annex (formerly known as Leslie Social Science Building) have walls so thin that they may as well be open-plan. Consultations, phone calls and even typing is audible to the extent that people feel they know their colleagues more intimately that the spouses of those colleagues might. Discussion invariably drifted to speculation on whether or not this was intentional - peer surveillance? Greater transparency?

Suggestions were made that perhaps, instead of dry wall, glass should be used. Or, better still, shoulder-level movable screening to create the kinds of cubicles found in companies like Old Mutual - where cameras could be mounted overhead for greater ease of monitoring.

It was an interesting discussion. I reflected afterward on what the Leslie had once been - a 1970s-styled tribute to open space and brown (those yucky carpet tiles...) - and what it has become, with every available square metre walled in and the brown superseded by clinical blue. And how, in other conversations, many of the longer-term occupants had yearned back to those early days of open space, of open head space, of open agendas and open hearts and minds...

Perhaps the leaky walls are a step in that direction, after all?

Facebook continues to cull headlines, many of them critical of real and perceived consumption: how much time people (usually employees) spend on it, how much (company) bandwidth it consumes, how much attention it siphons off from officially sanctioned activities.

Vincent Maher, for example, quantifies the projected cost to the SA economy of Facebook in the workplace at more than R100million over the next six months. Reason enough for some companies to be worried, and to consider blocking access.

But looking at costs presents just one side of the equation. A more balanced view would take into account would take into account not just costs, but benefits too. And the trouble with many benefits in this "knowledge economy" is that they're not immediately quantifiable, and less likely to impress the bean counters on a spreadsheet.

In an environment like a university, where knowledge is our stock-in-trade, we ought to be maximising the conditions for its successful production. "Productivity" is not as easily measured as in a bottle factory, and too often crude indicators such as "time at desk" serve to suffice.

With almost every business these days claiming to be a "knowledge business", is it not time for employers to start thinking through implications a little more holistically?

Well, it all depends on whom you believe, really.

Our own Department of Education outlined in its White Paper on Higher Education (1997, p7) the following four functions:

➢ To meet individual learning needs and aspirations of individuals (identified as a vehicle for equity);

➢ To address the development needs of society and the labour market and provide “self programmable labour”;

➢ To contribute to socialisation and the “common good” through the reproduction or transformation of social relations; and

➢ To contribute to the creation, sharing & evaluation of knowledge.

Manuel Castells, on the other hand (2001, p206 – 208) identified four historic functions of the University – all of which occur simultaneously within the same structure, albeit with different emphases at different times, in different places, and within different institutions (p211). These functions are listed as:

➢ Serving as an ideological apparatus
➢ The selection of dominant elites
➢ The generation of new knowledge (the “science function”)
➢ The training of professionals

These four functions operate in creative tension with each other, some supporting and enhancing others – for example, the “science” function and the “professional training” function – while others seemingly conflict, such as the “science” function and the “ideological function: the former often claiming to be “value-free” while the latter is explicitly value-driven.

There's little doubt which of these functions some Higher Education Institutions in the UK (and Oz?) are foregrounding when one hears of their latest endeavour: a UK University establishing a presence in Australia "to share expertise on how to counter terrorism"...

How accountable should a University be to the State? What degree of authority should the State have over the University - are there obligations in return for State funding, or should the University have complete independence from the State, bound only by its own imperatives?

There has been much debate locally on the matter, with some people feeling that a change in government should not equate with a change in relationship with the State and others feeling that the University has responsibilities as a "national asset"to participate in the national project.

Internationally, this debate has surfaced again recently, with calls by Hefce (Higher Education Funding Council in England) for the governance of Oxford University to be modernised. Oxford and Cambridge, both top-performing Universities, have resisted introducing a governance model they consider inappropriate, and have been allowed to continue - until now. With a new Prime Minister leading the UK, there are fears that this might soon change...

Two recent reports on studies of the workplace made me realise how very lucky we are to work in a place where neither of these could ever happen.

The first report - a study to be presented at the Academy of Management conference - concerned people who are promoted into management because of their bad leadership. Fortunately that never happens here, where every promotion is based on sound leadership skills, and bad management is unheard of thanks to careful screening, adequate resourcing and generous support.

The second report - see below - refers to a study which identified stupidity in the workplace as a serious health threat (to colleagues, alas, not to the stupid person themself). A number of incidents were cited where abject idiocy in the workplace had brought on heart attacks in otherwise "low-risk" subjects. Again, we're lucky here in that all of our colleagues are drawn from the membership of Mensa, preventing any kind of asinine behaviour.

Perhaps in the salary negotiations, we should be demanding danger pay?