Returning to her hometown after the funeral of her parents, writer, Erica Falck, finds a community on the brink of tragedy. The death of her childhood friend, Alex, is just the beginning. Her wrists slashed, her body frozen in an ice-cold bath, it seems like she has taken her own life.

While Lola took up residence on the desk as a bookend, I settled down in her usual spot on the chaise longue for the afternoon to read this latest fuel to my Scandinavian crime fiction obsession.

I should have been gritting my teeth at some of the elements – the commission to write a biographical tribute being a tenuous stepping off point for Falck’s investigation, the small-town secret that had to be unearthed, and the obvious romance between amateur and professional detective  - but there was a lot to enjoy. There was a strong sense of place and local culture – any book that has that much coffee-drinking deserves plaudits – and the romance was grounded in the realism with two unsure people worried about their bodies. Worth a read, and I may pick up others in the series.

P.S. On the back cover, the publisher feels it necessary not only to credit the translator, but to mention that this is Stieg Larsson’s and Henning Mankell’s translator, as if an added assurance of quality. I’m not dissing the translation – it flowed well – but am just mildly amused at the publisher’s efforts.

Not quite a Christmas post…actually, it should have been a November post…but with some rather festive looking, vaguely Christmassy lights…

Durham is a beautiful and historic city, but for the four day festival of light it was transformed into a magical, outdoor gallery.

Where else can you go to see an enormous anglepoise lamp on the railway station? The statue in the marketplace encased in a giant snowdome, I Love Durham? An interactive dance-floor, LED’s Dance, set in a nineteenth century amphitheatre? An illuminated waterfall, Splash, cascading from a bridge into the river? Or, my personal favourite above, the labyrinth of luminous towers representing natural radiation, Hartmann Grid.

The interplay between light and landscape was amazing, This wasn’t just a sculpture park with pieces of scuplture placed on an art trail, but relied absolutely upon the features of the Durham landscape – the cathedral, the river, trees, viaduct, statues and parks all became integral materials in the installations. There was a real sense of wonder in walking through the dark towards the patches of light, seeing the faces in the crowds illuminated in wonder.

See lumieredurham.co.uk

What’s not to like about a programme entitled Bay Watch? Or the number 6, who showed that he could be pretty handy in Newcastle on a Saturday night? Or the number 10, who didn’t move much, but when he got the ball, had a touch like a dream? Howay the Bay!

On an unrelated subject, the final three images to complete my Venetian alphabet. This was a photographic challenge I set myself on a day walking around Venice in March. They aren’t the greatest photographs, but are the record of a day spent looking at a city more closely and from a different perspective…

Stephen Bryan, a gay academic, is found brutally murdered in his bathroom. Will Grayson and Helen Walker , police detectives investigating the case, at first assume that his death is the result of an ill-judged sexual encounter … but doubts are soon raised.

On the whole I enjoyed this police procedural set in Cambridge. It was refreshing to have a largely  ’town’ rather than ‘gown’ crime, with the promise of police investigation rather than amateur sleuthing in the cosy crime tradition. However, the book did have something of a split personality with a complex historical back story being investigated in parallel by the victim’s sister.

It scored points on the crime cliche-o-meter with a distracting domestic difficulties and pressure from senior officers upon the hard-pressed heroic detective (not quite ‘you’ve got 24 hours to break the case’ but almost).

Melanie walks in the midnight garden wearing her mother’s wedding dress; naked she climbs the apple tree in the black of the moon. Disaster ensues, transporting Melanie from rural comfort to London, to the Magic Toyshop

Not quite a Christmas tale of goodwill to all men, but the dreamlike quality of Melanie’s awakening into adulthood, and the fantastical settings of the garden, the toyshop and the Exposition park, made this the perfect book to settle down with and be unsettled by on a Christmas afternoon.

This was Gibbins’ contribution to a collection of essays on The Organisation of Knowledge in Victorian Britain. In it, he argues for the importance of the curriculum in organising academic and intellectual life in the later nineteenth century.

The curriculum was important, argues Gibbins, because it was the architecture that defined what constituted knowledge, and how it was reproduced, through teaching. Through control of the syllabus, or canon, universities had the power to control the structure and shape of knowledge

Picking up on the debates about the professionalisation of academic life, Gibbins further argues that nineteenth cenury universities gained control over the organisation, production and reproduction of knowledge. The partnership of universities with the professions and social elites in this area made it difficult for ‘amateurs’ or individual ‘sages’ to compete in transmitting their ideas without gaining authority through inclusion in the curriculum and reproduction through teaching.

Gibbins makes a useful contribution to the debate on the nineteenth century university by pointing to the importance of the architecture of the curriculum as well as individual ideas, books or thinkers. However, I am not sure that the situation was as cut and dried as Gibbins suggests (necessarily within the confines of a short article). The delineation of university don and individual sage was becoming more defined during this period, but that boundary was still permeable, with societies and journals as well as family connections providing substantive points of intersection. There is also little mention of the definition of the authority of the university alongside that of the Church. This is a notable period in the exploration of the definition of authority in science and religion, but no substantive allusion to this is made.

Gibbins uses a couple of case studies in support of his argument, most notably the work of John Grote and Mark Pattison in exploring the nature of education and how it should prepare students for vocational or professional life. In the face of national pressure on the universities, these were men who argued that the best way for education to be professionally relevant was for it to teach studens how to think, to argue and to write. The object of study was more important than the approach – not only is this an example that supports Gibbins’ hypothesis about the importance of curriculum and the structure of knowledge, but it also allows him a segue to the current day debates where universities’ authority in structuring and conveying knowledge is being challenged.

Pearson is currently in a validation partnership with Royal Holloway, but is clear that its longer term aim is to seek degree awarding powers of its own. It is developing a suite of programmes by bringing together an academic lead, a student voice lead and an industry lead – saying that equal importance is accorded to each in designing its degrees. The focus is upon the interface between an academic degree and how it applies within the workplace.

Delivery is by blended learning: face-to-face locally through teaching centres, an online community, and through national annual industrial workshops and residential. The teaching centres offer a variety of ‘teaching ambiences’ (!!)  - from Pearson’s own premises to use of conference and hired centres across the country. The local centres are networked together therefore students progress as a single cohort but in different locations. Similarly, tutors and lecturers are part of a national teaching community delivering a nationally designed curriculum – which is intended to help consistency of quality.

Teaching, learning and assessment is designed to reflect work practices – so an assessed report rather than essay, use of appraisal to monitor progress, incorporation of a project centred around a project in business, and a final viva which is more like an interview for promotion, which can draw upon all aspects of the content and skills learned during the programme.

Becase the programme is innovative in form, it doesn’t fit into existing categories of part-time and full-time. It would qualify as full-time study over four years, but is designed for students who are working in relevant occupations. A two-year version is available for students who are not working, with the use of higher contact time and workshops to meet the gap of workplace skills.

In the second session, it was the battle of the Vice-Chancellors, in this case Geoffrey Crossick of University of London and Malcolm Gillies of London Metropolitan University.

It was Crossick’s view that the new regime of student demand led funding would result finally in a true acceptance of the diversity of the sector, hitherto disguised by the block grant and the language of the quality regime, as institutions sought to differentiate themselves by diversifying and specialising. He argued that international competition rather than public/private sector competition would provide the greater challenge on the horizon. He wanted to see a competitive level playing field, not only through scrutiny of private provision but also a greater recognition of the public good elements of what universities do.  He ended by identifying the challenge for UK HE to preserve its distinctiveness in producing graduate with the ability to think critically when delivering in newer, flexible and non-traditional models. He also warned against the danger of a social divide emerging between the traditional experience of HE that might become the preserve of those who could afford it, and the newer, more flexible, and by implication, cheaper but less prestigious modes of delivery.

Gillies took a deliberately more bullish stance. Assuming that sticking with the status quo was not an option, he saw the main choice as being between adaptation (doing some things differently, such as processes and programmes; choosing not to do some things, such as subject areas; and doing things that have not been done before, such as overseas ventures) and revolution (doing some things very differently such as going private; choosing not to do some things, such as face-to-face teaching in favour of going virtual; and doing things that have not been done before, such as focusing on teaching without research).

He identified a number of global themes or challenges about post-secondary education:

• Mass education not elite education
• Affordability/value for money and accessibility/participation
• In country or virtual rather than cross-border provision
• Ability to pay (individual, family, employer, or state) more important  than public or private divide
• Skills leading to jobs rather than qualifications
• Family opportunities rather than individual empowerment
• Global questions of change are being addressed by an unglobalised HE industry.

Whether or not one agrees with Gillies, he posed some questions that could be useful for any institution in considering its position in the face of current and future challenges:

• Are we about revolution or adaptation? How much continuity or discontinuity do we need and can we handle? Who are we – what is our identity?
• Is our purpose right? Where do we stand on the nexus between education and research? How much risk are we prepared to take in changing or not? Are we going to be leaders or followers?
• Is our mission still viable? How much reputation do we have which creates its own market (e.g. Oxford) or are we in search of a market? How aspirational can our mission be? How do we seek to balance private and public service?
• What is our domain? International, national or local? What community do we serve?
• How do we best serve our academic interests? By promising ‘excellent’ or ‘decent’?How tight or expansive s our curriculum? Are we a sole entity as an institution or a mothership?
• How do we best supply administrative and support functions? Sole entity or mothership? In situ or virtual? Core and peripheral?

The two men’s presentations embodied the differences between the two institutions they represented. Crossick opened his remarks by drawing upon the Annales school differentiation between surface perturbations and structural currents of change. He tried to step aside from the immediate funding issue, in essence characterising that as one in a series of surface perturbations, and focused, as one might expect for someone from an older and internationally recognised institution upon the adaptation of the traditional model of UK liberal education to new circumstances, on international competition, and on social inclusion. Gillies, on the other hand, positioned his institution as good enough rather than globally excellent, equipping students with the skills to get jobs, being financially accessible and locally focussed. Without the backing of international reputation and tradition, he positioned his institution as one that was prepared to think more radically about its goals.

The stated purpose of this joint conference between the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education and the University of London International Programmes was to provide a series of ‘glimpses’ of the pace and type of the change currently being experienced in Higher  Education, together with models of adaptation. The intention was to explore disruption and adaptation through the twin prisms of technology and innovation – the challenges of the digital revolution and of developing new delivery models in order to derive new funding streams.

In the first session, Ken Sloan of Serco described the context for HE where the major challenge came from the number of challenges that were being faced at once:  shifts in funding, uncertain future demand, HE’s role in national competitiveness, the entry of new players, the pace of and opportunity for technological change, and the changing range of international opportunity and competition. In this context, there were a number of potential responses:  business redesign, shared services, use of technology, strategic service partnerships, new venture partnerships and asset management. Using models from a number of sectors, Sloan made a number of points:

• ‘one size should not fit all’ – sticking to one channel of delivery builds in potential for dissatisfaction if it forces people into a particular approach. New user experiences can be designed around user needs rather than institutional capability
• good partnerships rest on an institution having a clear sense of is own goals, and of its own capacity and strength, before looking for a partner to supplement those capabilities in order to achieve the goal
• managing good partnerships would require universities to develop greater depth in skills in a number of areas, not least in the brokering, nurturing and management of relationships (In subsequent discussion, this was broken down into finding and assessing partnerships, assessing and managing risks, managing the ceding of elements of autonomy in the interest of partnership, and fulfilling the function of custodianship by considering the long term impact of partnership decisions being made in the current day).

This week the kittens are mostly eating wallpaper rather than books, which meant I had a clear run at this Daisy Dalrymple mystery.

The Hon Daisy Dalrymple finds herself in the middle of a murder investigation involving the death of an Oxford rower at the Henley regatta, of which her fiance, Detective Inspector Alec Fletcher, takes charge.

This is presented in the style of a 1930s cosy crime novel: imagine Lord Peter Wimsey’s sister as a flapper detective alongside her policeman husband. Some of the same themes covered in the Sayers’ books are also alluded to here – the class divide, women’s university education, and the long shadow of the first World War.

However, this prose is not to the same standard as Sayers, and there is not sufficient depth to the characterisation to make the attempts to touch on broader themes ring true. The overall impression is all a bit Daisy Pulls It Off