York House Update

Well another bunch of colleagues has just left York House. One colleague was telling me that they had been based in the building for 34 years. Many different offices over that time but 34 years in one building. A long time...

Having said that I came here as a student in 1985 and although I haven't been here the whole time since then I have been here most of the time. Where does the time go?

If you want to see more photos of York House then a search for York House NTU on Flickr brings up a number of collections featuring York House.

Data Protection Protection?

Do we need protection from the Data Protection act?
Or from how universities interpret the implementation of it?

The Times Higher Education (15 May 2008) reports the case of an academic (an Economist) who got into trouble for confirming the details of a student's timetable to the student's mother. This seems a bit harsh especially as the general pattern of attendance for first year students (who rarely take optional modules) can often be inferred from publicly available information on web sites, which advertise the core and optional modules available for each year of study. Would the university had rather he was economical with the truth? At what point does all the private data (individual marks, attendance and other relevant information) leap into the public arena when students obtain final degree classifications, seek references and so forth and that data must to some extent be verifiable if it is to have value?


http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/

A Time to Diet?

Well we've just received the details of our new room allocations (School of Social staff are all moving from York House to Chaucer) and the plans confirm that we'll all be rather cosy... time for that diet.