Craig Thomler's professional blog - AI and digital government thoughts and speculations from an Australian perspective
Craig Thomler
I've worked in the online sector since 1995 in roles including founder, publisher, journalist, webmaster, marketer, channel manager, CIO, COO and visionary. I left the public sector in early 2012 to lead Delib Australia as Managing Director Australia and New Zealand. More...
This new standard from the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) will advance accessibility across the full range of Web content (such as text, images, audio, and video) and Web applications. WCAG 2.0 can be more precisely tested, yet it allows Web developers more flexibility and potential for innovation. Together with supporting technical and educational materials, WCAG 2.0 is easier to understand and use.
AGIMO was surveying Government agencies regarding their views on mandating WCAG 2.0 for the Australian government. I'm looking forward to the outcomes from this.
In a first for an Australian Commonwealth government agency, the ABS is set to release most of its website data under Creative Commons licensing on 18-19 December.
Creative Commons provides a spectrum of licensing for the use of intellectual property between full copyright and public domain – in essence 'some rights reserved'. The ABS is poised to introduce Creative Commons licensing for the majority of its web content.
The relevant Creative Commons logo (which will link to the Attribution 2.5 Australia Licence) will be included at the bottom of every page on the ABS website.
This will allow greater legal reuse of ABS data, placing the organisation inline with similar central statistical agencies in other democratic countries.
This was previously recommended in the VentureAustralia report, reviewing the National Australian Innovation System. Released by the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Recommendation 7.8 stated that,
Australian governments should adopt international standards of open publishing as far as possible. Material released for public information by Australian governments should be released under a creative commons licence.
Is this a big deal for Australia?
I think so, it makes it legal to make greater use of Australian public sector data from the ABS and, through the Bureau's trailblazing, provides a case and greater comfort for other Commonwealth departments considering the same route.
In one of the more misguided approaches to internet regulation, the UK government banned the majority of UK citizens from editing Wikipedia earlier this week.
This was done, according to the SMH article, Wikipedia added to child pornography blacklist, due to the identification of a photo in one article (of the more than 2.6 million articles in Wikipedia) as being of a sexual nature and the entire site being added to the child pornography blacklist (ironically the same list that Senator Conroy has discussed using in Australia).
The image in question, of a 1976 German album cover, has not been banned elsewhere in the world, was publicly available in a physical form (as the cover of an album) and is digitally available at many other websites including Amazon.
Per the PC World article, in a facesaving effort, which ironically emphasises the difficulties of filtering the internet, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), the nonprofit group that blacklisted the Web page, stated that,
The image in the Wikipedia article is hosted outside the U.K., an issue addressed by the IWF in its statement Tuesday. "Any further reported instances of this image which are hosted abroad, will not be added to the list. Any further reported instances of this image which are hosted in the U.K. will be assessed in line with IWF procedures."
The IWF lamented that while its goal is to minimize the availability of indecent images of children on the Internet, its decision to blacklist the Wikipedia article "had the opposite effect."
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.
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.
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