I think Australia has finally gone bonkers, at least the Tory part of it. How could any credible political party elect a man who has such a casual relationship with principle an whose past is littered with bullying, sexism, egotism and self-promotion to such an enormous degree? Abbott is surely the least electable prospect on the Liberal horizon, part from that comedian Kevin Andrews. And now the debate will start in earnest over climate change, with the Trogs like Nick Minchin able to peddle their anti-intellectual, pro-business scare-mongering to the public at large. The only result will be to annihilate the liberal wets in the Senate at the next election , with the Greens left holding the balance of power. Thank God that looney Protestant proxy, Steve Fielding, will be sidelined. But sucked in, Joe Hockey: Shrek was too clever by half.

Ross Gittins had some sensible comments in his SMH column this morning. Some extracts…

Scaremongering over the trading scheme is worse than the fear campaign against the GST. Don’t be fooled.

…

It is pathetically easy to frighten people about the consequences of complicated economic changes. Labor did it to the Liberals over the introduction of the goods and services tax, now the Libs are returning the compliment with the trading scheme.

…

The scaremongers claim the scheme is a form of disguised taxation. That’s true. It would force up the price of energy (though not petrol for at least the first three years) because most energy generation uses fossil fuels that cause large emissions of carbon dioxide.

Making fossil fuels more expensive is intended to encourage us to use them less wastefully, insulate our homes, switch to solar power and so forth. It’s also intended to encourage electricity generators and others to switch to low-emission sources of energy.

It’s said that the cost of electricity is built into the cost of everything we buy, so all prices would go up. That is true, but exaggerated. For most things, the cost of electricity is a small proportion of their retail price, so this effect will be a lot smaller than the scaremongers lead you to believe.

…

Would a lot of jobs be lost and a big hole knocked in economic growth? No. The changes would be quite gradual and would mainly take the form of some emissions-intensive industries growing weakly or stagnating while other, low-emissions industries expanded more strongly.

…

Joyce keeps saying this new tax will do nothing to reduce climate change. That’s a half-truth. It is true that, since only a reduction in global emissions will affect the climate, Australia’s contribution to global emissions is too small to affect our climate or anyone else’s.

But this is why our Government would reduce our emissions by only 5 per cent of their 2000 level by 2020 in the absence of action by other countries. Such a modest target is hardly likely to wreak havoc in our economy.

…

The scaremongers want you to believe that foolhardy Australia is going first in cutting emissions, leaving us open to exploitation. It isn’t true. The Europeans and some others already have schemes running and in the past few weeks many developed countries have announced what they are prepared to do if an agreement is forthcoming.

…

And the sooner we get started, the less the disruption to the economy. The main way reductions will occur are by businesses and households opting for more energy-efficient or low-emission models when it comes time to buy a new car, electrical appliance or hot-water heater, build a new home or replace a worn-out power station.

So the earlier we get the scheme started, the more we can avoid the tragedy of people making new, long-term investments in polluting technology. It has suited the interests of people on both sides of politics to cause us, or allow us, to be misinformed about the consequences of an emissions trading scheme. Don’t be anyone’s dupe.

• The National Collection of Aerial Photography
  They've just added all the surviving wartime reconnaissance photos to this archive. Wow!
  (tags: Photography history)

Genova Poster

While the acting and photography in Genova have been justly acclaimed, we remain profoundly ambivalent about the film. Perhaps the script was one or two steps too clever, or was the ghost motif just over-used? It’s hard to tell; but the end of the film left one with a profound feeling of anticlimax.

As a study in grief, much of the psychology works well. Joe, Kelly and Mary each react to grief in different ways; Joe through immersion in routine, Kelly through subversion and experimentation, Mary through fantasy and withdrawal. The city itself becomes a reflection of their progress, its history and labyrinthine alleys a visual representation of the oppression of grief. Mary becomes obsessed with churches and saints – all good until the ghost of her mother starts talking, which robbed the idea of it’s power.

The film’s visual style is gritty and engaging, with hand-held digital the dominant technology. Light is always naturalistic and the film strived for an almost documentary plainness.

It doesn’t need resolution, but the plot needs some better point to finish. The film clearly argues for the need to accept, even to surrender to grief but to embrace life as part of healing. There are no happy endings in this post-modern catastrophe, except in melodrama. The chosen point at which the script leaves the family is good symbolically but doesn’t translate emotionally on the screen.

Colin Firth is excellent and shows that he is more than a rom-com star. The two girls are both memorable in their roles, although Mary’s screams were too realistic! But it is the Italian urban landscape and the sunlight that are the real stars.

• Tom Vander Ark: How Social Networking Will Transform Learning
  Have to do a blog on this at some stage: I don't know if I agree with all his assumptions. As usual, it doesn't take into account any perspective except the American, and there is a lot more world out there.
  (tags: socialnetworking education web2.0 Curriculum elearning)

• ChocoFlop – Non-destructive image editing application for your mac
  This is a rather impressive piece of software: worth a try and certainly cheaper than Photobloat.
  (tags: mac Photography free)
• Blogging About The Web 2.0 Connected Classroom: The Essential Tools For The Connected Teacher-Part 1
  Nice range of ideas!
  (tags: education web2.0 teaching)
• thebestcamera.com – Recent Photos
  This is probably the most interesting and certainly educational social networking idea I've come across yet. The application is more than useful, but the idea of promoting thoughtful image-making using an iPhone can only encourage people to be better photographers.
  (tags: education socialnetworking Apple Photography)

I’ve spent the last four weeks writing papers – well, really writing ONE paper – for my doctorate, and I have finally reached the state where I have to write about something else. Indeed, I need to write about anything else. If you had told me when I took this month off work that it would come down to a 2500 word framework paper, I would have strangled you. Even though I have probably written about 6,000 words in the process, and then cut and cut and clarified, it still remains one of the most difficult experiences in many years of academic work.

The step up is, of course, the move from critique to creativity. In an undergraduate degree, all you learn is what is in the field. I suppose my arts degree told me what I needed to know and then sent me out to find out. At Masters level, one learns to critique what others think they know. In this doctoral program, I am supposedly generating new knowledge, so the sense of exposure is quite acute. With John and Narrotam determined to get me publishing, I feel like a target even though the proposal is not yet presented.

It has been an interesting journey (and you can read successive drafts at my Collective Efficacy site), but one that I would not care to repeat. Now I am madly catching up with the things I need to know, which involves stitching together background knowledge into more bits of the Literature Review.

The time has come to blog. Differently. Therefore, I am going to write about anything other than the doctorate in this blog, as often as possible, even if I only talk about the apps on my iPhone.

So there.

• Better the broken Windows than life with the Mac monks
  Ahhhh, so true!
  (tags: Apple)

What a brilliant idea for poorer countries, and what a great science trick!

• Victorian students go to top of national class | The Australian
  (tags: LiteracyResources education)

Mark Pesce

• Unintended consequences of technology: attacking hierarchies which used to control information.
• Mobile phones are intrinsically networked devices with all of those consequences
• RateMyProfessor as a corrosive of academic values: competition for ‘popular’ professors
• Straighterline on-line universities
• Digital Revolution is a cultural revolution
• The right questions are the hard questions

Michelle Selinger

• 21st C Learning models
• Blending school and home learning
• Formal learning tools may not be the same as web 2 tools used at home, but they may be similar
• It’s not about what we learn but about how we learn.
• ICT/Network as the fourth utility (Electricity/water/gas)

Neil Jackson

• School leadership is key
• Classroom shape and timetable structure will breakdown
• Anytime, anywhere learning
• Change in the role of teachers
• Multipoint sharing devices
• Use of mobile technology in schools: let the students bring the phone to school and find ways to help them use them.
• E-mail is to slow for students: they prefer IM or Facebook

Generally—

• The biggest problem with this seminar is the tendency of participating ‘experts’ to engage in implicit spruiking. Apart from Mark Pesche, much of this is Telstra making grandiose claims about their network and Microsoft assuming that we are all captive to their lack of innovation.
• Speculation about the hardware of 21CL is almost a barrier to understanding what it will be about. We don’t know what we will learning on and with, but we do understand some of the mechanisms.
• North Asian economies regard the area as competition: Australia is on the map and this concerns countries like Korea.
• DET documents on teacher skills.

At this point (still not had morning tea, about to enter hypoglycaemic state) there is an interesting discussion about the importance of collaboration. One presenter made a telling point about importance of it to knowledge testing and development: one radio station was able to precipitate the massacres in Rwanda by calling for the elimination of Tutsis and pro-peace Hutus —because there was not way of collaborating to test the information. That couldn’t happen in a connected, networked society, because there isn’t a monopoly on information. Mark Pesche noted that the use of ‘file-sharing’ by one presenter was like a time-warp: we shoudn’t share, we should collaborate. It is exactly the same as the move from the O Drive to ATLAS SharePoints. The difference is significant. My experience in developing exams through collaboration, and even getting students to upload practice essays rather than e-mail them to me, confirms this.

A comment from the floor raise the vexed issue of nanny-state firewall policies. Thank heavens Svetlana has a sensible approach to this!

It is becoming pretty obvious that choice and access is not a negotiable question: we can’t dictate the Platform or the level of access. We need to provide access to the network and, except for specialised tools, we should get out of the business of providing and managing hardware. We no longer provide pencils – and schools never did past a certain stage, I think after Year 3. So why are we undertaking the role of platform provider. The other side of this is that is restricts choice: the analogy is EFFERYONE VILL USE ZER SAME BRAND OF ZER BIRO!!! UND YOU MUST GET IT FROM THE TROLLEY!!!! We would laugh … but that is the model of IT access that we currently have.

Nearly all the presenters are now focusing on Higher Education and the enormous impact ICT has had on teaching and learning at the undergraduate and graduate level: that’s something I can attest to. How will students cope with the learning environments of uni and TAFE if we don’t prepare them for that?

Can we change the language of teachers from ‘classroom’ to ‘learning environments’.