This is Faridah Newman.  She was so depressed that she had to stop studying for her Oxford degree for two terms.  Now she’s back at university, thriving academically and running an online jewellery business that earns her hundreds of pounds a month.

Click here to read my interview with her for Cherwell.

Lecture conjecture

Paris, the 9-to-5, the bothering world leaders… all that is a distant memory.  I’m back in Oxford for my fourth and final year of higher education.

Returning to university hasn’t been as much as a culture shock as I’d feared.  Yes, eating in a canteen with 200 other people feels strange after nine months of living alone and working in an office of three.  And yes, my 18-month absence has made me a stranger in my own college.  And then there’s that tidbit that doesn’t cease to bewilder my girlfriend: “The freshers were born in the Nineties! The NINETIES!”

But all things considered, it’s been a relatively painless return to the world of porters, proctors and pigeonholes.

With one exception.  I noticed it on the very first Monday of term.  A couple of seconds into my first lecture, to be precise. It came in the form of a frenetic tap-tap-tap-tap emanating from all sides.

Yep, everyone has laptops in lectures.  This. Is. Wrong.  Here’s why:

When I left last summer, the only computer in the lecture hall would belong to the lecturer, who would scream at it to connect to the projector before pleading with PowerPoint to load their presentation (which would inevitably be full of naff transitions and animations like “checkerboard” and “faded swivel” as if we were in a middle-management meeting to promote synergy and forecast sales figures).

Back in this golden age of lecture etiquette, the only sound to supplement the lecturer’s voice would be the rustling of paper handouts and the scratch of pens frantically trying to capture any nuggets of wisdom that might save their owner in an exam.  The gods of academia intended it to be ever thus.

Now, though, those wisdom nuggets are being drowned out by a collective tap-tap-tap as an army of MacBook-weiling drones attempt to hammer in the lecturer’s every words as if we’re in some collective dictation exercise.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not some tradition fetishist afraid of progress.  But this is a regression: in medieval universities, before printing, when books were expensive, lectures were simply a dictation exercise.  Just as a lecturer then would have had to go slower so that everyone could keep up with their quills, now people are asking lecturers to repeat points that were drowned out by the cacophony of fingers plugging away at keyboards.

So here’s an (unoriginal but no less fantastic for it) idea for real progress with lectures: record them as podcasts and slam them online with full quotations, references, picture addenda, and so on.

Advantages for the student:

• lasting revision resource
• more flexible timetable
• “lecture clash” consigned to dustbin
• hand cramp consigned to medical sharps bin

Advantages for the lecturer:

• huge amounts of time freed up by not having to deliver the same lecture year-on-year
• less chance of contracting illness from plague-ridden undergraduates
• no more annoying “can you send me the handout?” emails

Advantages for the environment:

• no more paper handouts
• less lecturer-produced hot air

I’m sure there are objections about contact time being important, transferable skills, meeting fellow students, blah blah blah, but I think they’re all rubbish.  Classes and tutorials will never be replaced by online equivalents in Oxford, and they provide more than enough of the above.  So here’s hoping the MacBook clan have inadvertently pushed the lecture into cyberspace.

Getting to grips with my camera.

I am very easily amused.

View from the office roof

Easy like Sunday morning?

Bag shopping is “a national sport for Japanese women visiting Paris”, if you believe this site.

Unfortunately for our Japanese visitors, the French national sport is administrative bickering. In this case, over the Sunday opening of Louis Vuitton’s store on the Champs Elysées.

On Wednesday, France’s highest administrative court, the Conseil d’État, cancelled the order allowing the 1,900m² store to open on Sundays.

Work law here only allows retailers to open on five Sundays a year. But venues of cultural value can apply to be exempted from this rule.

You might be wondering how Louis Vuitton was ever considered a cultural venue in the first place. Well, there’s an exhibition space on the seventh floor. And they sell some books about art and travel. And I guess some of the stuff they sell is so obscenely expensive that you can only look at it as art.

But that didn’t cut it for the Conseil d’État.

Nevertheless, Vuitton store staff shouldn’t count on getting a Sunday lie-in quite yet - while the 2005 and 2007 orders have been annulled, it looks like somebody forgot about the 3-year license renewal granted in December 2008…

The highlight of the the Salon International de l’Agriculture for me.