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Being a parent with school-aged children, their education and future prospects are of significant interest and concern to me.
I want to ensure that my children are prepared for the world as it will exist in ten, twenty and thirty or more years.
The government should be at least as concerned. The impacts of effective or ineffective education have long-term ramifications for a nation, which can be experienced as a shortage of skilled workers, falling innovation and company/job creation, slower economic growth, inadequate leadership and even, in extreme cases, the disintegration of a nation's fabric.
I am acutely conscious that the majority of WHAT I learnt at school 30 years ago has not provided significant benefit in the areas I have worked in. The majority of my practical knowledge came from outside official learning channels.
Even at university in the late 80s, though the subject matter was more useful, the teaching techniques (large lecture halls and crowded tutorials), were not an effective environment for many people to learn.
The jobs I have worked in since the mid-1990s did not exist ten years before - in most cases the organisations and their business models did not exist either.
So how do we prepare our children to be effective, successful and happy contributors to a future economy?
This is one of those big hairy audacious problems for which I don't see simple solutions - predicting five years into the future is hard, let alone 30 or 40 years.
Two things I experienced at school did prepare me for the future world (of today). A passion for learning and an understanding of how to seek out information and process it.
These two skills are in my view the most important that can be taught to any children. They lead to flexibility and adaptiveness, skills that our current and future economy will need in abundance. They also lead to individuals that are confident, able to effectively assess risks and willing to build new things, not simply propogate the old.
So the question for me becomes - does our current schooling system still foster these two skills amongst our children?
Or does the system we have today focus on subject matter (curriculum) rather than individual learning capacity and outcomes?
I believe that the biggest learning factor in any education are the teachers. The second biggest factor are the other students. Third is accessibility to information and the actual material or curriculum is a distant fourth.
In my view if adequately trained teachers are not available, or if students are not encouraged and supported to work together collaboratively it does not matter how good the curriculum is - the learning outcomes will be poor.
So are we paying enough attention to education in government, even with the 'education revolution'?
I'm not sure yet - however the following video from Professor Michael Wesch, brought to my attention by Stephen Collins of Acidlabs in his post, Connect.Ed - The story of a girl, raises real questions in my mind.
And so does Mark Pesce's post, Those Wacky Kids, on his blog the human network and the post by Harriet Wakelam, Connect.ed or Once upon a time there was a boy... at her blog Technology Twitter.
How do others feel about the adequacy of our education systems?
And is the current debate over 'Gen Y' workers at least partially related to the education they were given?
Do we need an 'e-education revolution'?
Thursday, December 11, 2008
How well does government serve our children? | Tweet |
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Almost 20% of Australians are on Facebook | Tweet |
About this time last year Laurel Papworth reported that Facebook listed over 2 million Australians as members in a post in her blog titled, Australia has over 2 million Facebook members.
I've just rechecked this figure, using the same approach as Laurel (via Facebook's ad tool), and found that Facebook now lists 4,252,860 Australian members - a growth rate of over 100% for the last twelve months.
Of these, 3,957,900 are over the age of 18, 1,400,900 are over the age of 30 and only 185,780 are over the age of 50.
It seems that women are more active users (2,407,200 females versus only 1,724,340 males) and only 93,100 confess to being university (college) graduates (versus about 200,000 university students) - though education level can be left blank by members and does not provide a full picture.
It is also possible to look at Facebook members by city/town, marital status and sexual preference, but with less accuracy.
What does it mean for a government when 20% of it's population, and almost 4 million voters, have chosen to use a particular medium?
Governments regularly advertise their initiatives and engage constituents in mediums with a fraction of this 'readership'.
Perhaps we need to see greater government involvement in social media as well.
The first official Federal consultative blog | Tweet |
The eGovernment Resource Centre has tipped me off that the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy has set up a consultative Future directions blog for two weeks with the purpose of soliciting public comments that will contribute to the development of a Future directions paper for the digital economy.
It's good to see that some time has gone into thinking about having a Terms of use, Moderation policy, specific Privacy policy (rather than relying on the general policy for the site).
There's also a feedback tool for people who wish to comment on the blog itself rather than on the policy.
What is not good to see is that the approach isn't using an effective blogging platform and the moderation approach has meant that in 11 pages of comments so far, not one commenter has referenced other comments, which means that no cross-dialogue is occurring. There's also been no official responses to blog comments as yet, but it is early days (less than 24 hours since it went live) - hopefully we'll see more conversation than talking past each other.
Given that the aim of the initiative is to collect community views and reactions, fed by a series of posts by the department, a blog is a reasonable, if not the best, choice of tools and the Future Directions blog at least gets the ball rolling.
Working in government, I've encountered the difficulties in using a real blogging tool, also commented on in this APC Magazine article, The 10 sins of Senator Conroy, the blogger, and hope that as the government's acceptance and experience of the internet improves, so shall it's capacity to engage.
I am also hopeful that the Department will look further afield than at direct responses in this blog at the posts on other blogs, forums, wikis, micro-blogging channels, timelines and other Web 2.0 mediums related to the topic (here's an example).
There's already a large number of comments on the blog - dominated by the Filter discussion, which is a topic I have been developing a post on, focused on how internet users have self-organised via Twitter, blogs and forums to oppose the initiative, culminating in a series of rallies in all Australian capital cities this Saturday 13 December.
It will be interesting to see whether, with the current focus on the Filter debate, many people will respond on the specific topic of the Digital economy.
I will also find it interesting to see whether the community perceives there to actually be a 'digital economy'. Personally I think there's one economy but with a range of different communications and distribution channels (but I'll say more on this in one of my comments on the Future Directions blog itself).
Friday, December 05, 2008
Is self-organised government coming? | Tweet |
Reading the Connected Republic this morning, Paul Johnston has written an interesting post, Us Now: On the Road to Self-Organised Government?, about the new documentary, US Now, which explores the power of self-organising groups and what they might mean for society and the public sector.
The film has just previewed in London, however clips, a blog and other information is available at the Us Now website and the Us Now Youtube channel.
Storing and exposing public data sets | Tweet |
Governments collect and distribute a massive amount of public data each year. It is a continual challenge to make this data accessible and usable for citizens, commercial organisations, researchers, scientists and policy makers.
This challenge isn't limited to a few dedicated statistical organisations, such as the ABS. Many other government departments collect, collate and publish extensive public data about their customers, about the market and about their operations.
Putting on my previous private sector hat, public data can be difficult to locate, download and use in a meaningful way to add value to an organisation. I have struggled at times to discover all of the data I needed and combine the different datasets (from different public providers) with internal data in ways that add value to my employers.
The challenges around public data have led Amazon to launch Public Data Sets on its Amazon Web Services platform.
Described as a "convenient way to share, access, and use public data", the system is designed to provide "a centralized repository of public data sets that can be seamlessly integrated into AWS cloud-based applications."
Why is this significant?
The approach makes it much faster and easier for organisations to locate, download, customise and analyse large public data sets - such as census, scientific or industry data.
Using Amazon's system,Now, anyone can access these data sets from their Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and start computing on the data within minutes. Users can also leverage the entire AWS ecosystem and easily collaborate with other AWS users. For example, users can produce or use prebuilt server images with tools and applications to analyze the data sets. By hosting this important and useful data with cost-efficient services such as Amazon EC2, AWS hopes to provide researchers across a variety of disciplines and industries with tools to enable more innovation, more quickly.
Amazon has already exposed data sets such as the US Census and various labour statistics. Shortly it will also provide transport databases and economic databases.
All of these are public data sets being provided by US government bureaus.
Also available are scientific information such as Human Genome data, a collection of all publicly available DNA sequences and chemical structures.
Amazon is also working to provide further public domain or non-proprietary data sets and invites organisations to submit applications for data to be included.
Given that this data capacity sits alongside Amazon's cloud computing service, providing an expandable virtual computing environment, it becomes possible for a range of organisations, researchers and individuals to access and make more effective use of large sets of public data, supporting innovation and democratising the marketplace.
It also allows for the creation of data mash-ups, combining data across different agencies with other data sources, maps, graphics, charts and analysis tools to generate new ways of experiencing data and new insights.
I don't expect Amazon to be the only provider of this type of capacity, Google is very committed to cloud computing and organising the world's data. Microsoft and IBM are also moving rapidly into these spaces.
In the long run I see this type of platform as a very valuable distribution tool for governments seeking to make their public data accessible and usable by the broadest possible group of citizens and organisations.
In turn this will broaden and deepen innovation and permit new realisations based on cross-referencing data from different providers - becoming a competitive advantage for countries savvy enough to make their public data more accessible.
What would it take for Australia to make its public data available via this type of channel? A phone call or email to Amazon and some work in structuring our datasets.
That's a low entry cost compared to the challenge of building a replica system.
