The next time some-one, particularly a Politician, suggests climate anomalies and surface warming is not a [the] critical policy challenge of our time, ask them if they would bet their house or their life on tossing a coin 330 times and getting the same result? The average global temperature across land and oceans during August 2012 was 0.62°C (1.12°F) above…
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Vale Jack Keating. A teacher, colleague, mentor and friend; Jack, you will be missed. Those that have had anything to do with post-compulsory education in Victoria, Australia or around the world, will understand the loss to our field. Thank you Jack. Lector si monumentum requiris circumspice Links: Vale Jack Keating - The Australian 24th July 2012 Vale Jack Keating…
Confessions of a "non-facebooker".. or.. why the cost of admission is too steep! If you're not paying for something, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold. - Andrew Lewis My colleague stood genuinely "stunned" for a few seconds while they tried to process the fact I was not on Facebook, had never used Facebook and clearly had no…
Three years ago today, I witnessed first-hand, the unrelenting and profoundly destructive force of the fires that created Australia's worst natural disaster in recorded history. The fires that began on February 7th 2009 "Black Saturday" took many lives, destroyed many homes and buildings and most certainly altered the psyche of many that I know, including me. 1000 plus degrees is…
Another very nice piece of work visualising data. Visualizing.org is displaying some animated age-pyramids that tell a unique story of the challenges of growth in the coming decades. From the site: On October 31, 2011, demographers at the United Nations reported that the earth’s population had reached 7 billion. That number marks an increase of 1 billion in…
My research [Masters] in comparative education and equity is leading me to many interesting and challenging topics. One of hundreds... "What are the long-term effects of class sizes on the achievement gap? In essence, this paper suggests that findings on the social distribution of the immediate and lasting benefits of small classes have been mixed. Link: JSTOR - American Journal…
A collection of vocational education and training (VET) related research and policy documents from various regions of the world are now available online on VOCED, including many of the older print-based copies. VOCED is the international research database with over 35,000 documents available. Link: New international documents available on VOCED.
Executive Director of the Lowy Institute, Michael Wesley, gave a short presentation in Melbourne, with the broad theme being that coming years are likely to see Australia facing the most challenging global environment in our history. Read on at CoreEcon.. Australia's next great challenge?.
Do Teachers Matter?. A psychology study hit the headlines last Friday under the banner ‘Teacher quality makes little difference, study shows’. AN AUSTRALIAN study has cast doubt over the “teacher effect”, by suggesting differences between teachers play only a minor role in how well a child will learn. The global study, led by the University of New England, monitored 500 pairs…