(On Rupert Murdoch, Google and the Apple iPad)
Jonathan Holmes, from the ABC's MediaWatch program, has written a nice little piece for The Drum. He addresses the fact that many in the newpaper industry, including Rupert Murdoch, are busy wetting themselves over the iPad.
Murdoch apparently thinks that the iPad and its competitors will be the saving of the newspaper industry. Why? Because they (the newspapers) will be able to sell apps that deliver the newspaper "experience", providing users with something that is more like the actual paper article than websites currently provide. And they are hoping this will resurrect the industry.
What Murdoch and co. do not seem to get is that there is an enormous contingent of news conusmers who just aren't interested in what they are planning on offering. Young people have become used to news for free. Why would they suddenly want to pay for it? When (and it is 'when', not 'if') the newspapers put their content behind pay-walls, those young people will simply look elsewhere - and there will be an elsewhere to look.
Even my generation, who grew up with newspapers, have become accustomed to using the web and aggregators to find the news. And in that, we have acquired something that the likes of Murdoch don't seem to understand - we decide what news we want.
Holmes correctly pinpoints this in his article: "...this isn't just the difference between paying and not paying. It's the difference between deciding on your own news agenda, or buying someone else's." And I for one, ain't buying. And I don't think I'll be alone.
Murdoch also made the news this week for re-iterating his threat to put a pay-wall around his online newspapers to keep Google and Microsoft out.
My reaction to this bit of non-news: good! With any luck, this bunker mentality will see him off completely.
The newspapers do not seem to understand that their old model ("we'll decide what you want to know about, write it up and bundle it up for you, and you can pay us for it") is no longer really viable, and will disappear at about the same time as my father's generation. So they need to do something different - if they can. It's difficult to say what that should be.
Comic book producers, on the other hand, will probably survive. Why? Tim Bray (now at Google, as it happens) nailed it: "the two things you do with comics are read them and trade them". [Link] And therein lies the difference between a comic book and a newspaper: no one lines the bottom of the budgie cage with a comic book.
Thursday, April 08, 2010
Thursday, April 01, 2010
Repeating Myself
[This is a re-post/cross-post from another blog of mine.]
Who in their right mind would be a high school Maths teacher? I must be nuts.
I’m tempted to stop right there – what more needs to be said? But I’ll elaborate a little, just so the screen isn’t so empty (poignant though that might be).
You see, nobody really cares about what it is that I do as a Maths teacher. They think they do, but because they have no real understanding of what Mathematics is or why you would study it, they are quite wrong.
What’s prompted me to say this? Mainly the obscene politicising of education in this country. Education has always been a political football to some extent, but the stupidity has reached new lows under the Rudd government.
You see, what the politicians what, and what they’ve persuaded parent that they should want, and to some extent what school principals want, is not for students to learn about Mathematics. They want them to learn about arithmetic and numeracy.
Now, I’m sure that for most politicians, many parents and quite a few principals, the distinction between Mathematics and numeracy is lost on them. And therein lies the problem - decisions about education are being made by people who do not understand the distinction. I’m sure that much the same issue lies in other subject areas.
How can I state the above so confidently? Simply by considering the obvious: an Education Minister who would implement a website that compares schools based on the results of once-a-year tests, given to four of the thirteen year levels, in the areas of literacy and numeracy and virtually nothing else, and who defends such a move by claiming that parents want transparency, clearly knows nothing about education.
Is this to say that the NAPLAN tests don’t have a purpose? Of course not, but to use such data to encapsulate the “performance” of an entire school in a set of 20 numbers is absurd.
Politicians like to be seen to be doing something, and Education is an arena where it’s easy for them to rearrange the furniture and claim to have made progress. It’s long been so. But the Rudd government has taken matters to another level. They have firmly shifted the emphasis away from the notion of providing a comprehensive education to a scenario where the focus year-by-year will be on the NAPLAN results, particularly once funding becomes closely tied to those results. Principals and education departments will be under pressure to secure funding, which means teachers will be under pressure to secure results that will deliver that funding, which means the focus will be to teach to the test. And because the NAPLAN tests are about literacy and numeracy and little else, the curriculum will narrow over time, as principals and education departments in the main are not going to pour time and money into areas that won’t affect funding.
Now doesn’t that all work in the favour of my particular subject, Mathematics? No, not really. The problem is that the focus is on numeracy, not Mathematics. The pollies want the kiddies to be able to do their sums well – being able to do trigonometry, quadratic equations and matrix operations is irrelevant to them.
And it’s becoming just as irrelevant to the students themselves. More than ever, I am being confronted with students who not only come out with the age-old “when will I ever need this?”, but who are quite sure that if they ever actually do need it, they will be able to get what they need from the Web, whether through tutorials, discussion forums, online courses or some other way.
Add to that parents who struggled with Maths at school and who are subsequently dismissive of it, is it any wonder I feel that my vocation is becoming a bit pointless?
So I repeat: nobody really cares about what it is that I do as a Maths teacher. They care about students having arithmetic skills. They care about the NAPLAN results because they think it means something. They love the government’s “back to basics” mantra, because it means “back to something I think I can understand”.
But don’t ask for more than that.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Thoughts on the Education Revolution - Why We Are Going In Circles
The Rudd government’s “Education Revolution” has now progressed through a number of phases.
1. The Big Sell
This was the pre-election “look at us, we have the answers” phase, where Rudd waved about a laptop and promised to spend a billion dollars giving every Yr 9 students a similar laptop. This ‘largesse’ certainly pleased a lot of people (particularly journalists) who thought it sounded like a nifty, forward-thinking idea but who couldn’t be bothered to do the sums and work out that one billion dollars was well short of what would really be needed to follow through on the promise. And it seems that few people have stopped to consider how this promise was meant to pan out over the long term, or what sort of money is really needed to provide the maintenance and infrastructure to go with providing students in senior high school years with laptops.
2. The Big Spend in the wake of the Big Crash
Well, not quite that big a crash (if you look behind you, you’ll see Wayne Goose Swan jumping up and down, saying “Thanks to me! I spent lotsa money and made it all better! Me! It was me!” and a little behind him you’ll see Nassim Nicholas Taleb shaking his head and tutting), but it gave Rudd and Co. licence to spend even more money “building the Education Revolution”, which was code for building several thousand Julia Gillard Memorial School Halls and not giving a rat’s rear about whether the money was actually spent effectively (which in many public schools it apparently hasn’t, if the commercial news channels are to be believed).
3. The Big League Table
Julia Gillard declared the MySchool website a huge success, apparently on the basis that a lot of people logged on to see what the fuss was about. The air was heavy with buzzwords like "transparency" and "informed parents", but mention league tables and you could expect Ms Gillard to keep you in at recess for a good haraguing.
But let's be honest - what is the MySchool website but a digitised league table on steroids, reducing schools down to a small set of numbers and then drawing up a set of dodgy comparisons based on badly flawed socio-economic measurements.
4. The Big Curriculum
The government has released the Draft National Curriculum - or, to be precise, about one-third of one. Rudd and Gillard have described it as “back to basics”, which in the English components means more phonics, phonetics and grammar, but less literature; in the Mathematics components, we apparently will now be using calculators from Kindergarten, but not teaching the 7 times tables. (What the...? An oversight, surely. Would you believe...?)
But what has really been achieved?
The laptops have arrived in most schools, which are now dealing with issues of management, networking and maintenance (and the budgetary headaches that come with that), as well as needing to inservice teachers in how to use them in the classroom. The Federal government has 'generously' decided that the States need to deal with these issues (and the money).
There are schools all across the country in various states of chaos as building projects grind slowly on, quite a number of them apparently not what the schools really wanted or needed, and many apparently costing far more than they ought to.
Journalists and politicians have fallen over themselves about the MySchool website, enthralled by having ready access to something they can understand - "this school's better than that school, because the numbers say so". Sadly, some parents appear to be falling for this dreck as well.
The curriculum is set to be introduced in 2011 - whether schools and teachers are ready or not. And the indications are - not. The various teachers’ unions have publicly raised the issue, but the government still hasn’t talked to them. How do you introduce a curriculum and not talk to the people you expect to implement it?
Is it a curriculum for the 21st century? By my reading, not really. It’s still firmly welded to the 20th century, in keeping with a federal government that still clings to the ‘factory’ model of education and regards it as essentially a tool for increasing economic productivity.
(Interestingly, Edward de Bono has commented on the curriculum, criticising it for not including thinking skills. Yes, this has been de Bono’s soapbox for nearly two decades, and thus his criticism is hardly surprising, but in the era of the Internet, could anything be more critical than thinking skills?)
Looking at what has been put in place, and comparing it to what governments have done in the area of education over the last three or four decades, the only significant difference is that in this instance, it’s been a federal government rather than a state one that has delivered an unbalanced set of resources, mismanaged taxpayers’ dollars and implemented curriculum changes that don’t quite hit the mark.
Round and round we go.
1. The Big Sell
This was the pre-election “look at us, we have the answers” phase, where Rudd waved about a laptop and promised to spend a billion dollars giving every Yr 9 students a similar laptop. This ‘largesse’ certainly pleased a lot of people (particularly journalists) who thought it sounded like a nifty, forward-thinking idea but who couldn’t be bothered to do the sums and work out that one billion dollars was well short of what would really be needed to follow through on the promise. And it seems that few people have stopped to consider how this promise was meant to pan out over the long term, or what sort of money is really needed to provide the maintenance and infrastructure to go with providing students in senior high school years with laptops.
2. The Big Spend in the wake of the Big Crash
Well, not quite that big a crash (if you look behind you, you’ll see Wayne Goose Swan jumping up and down, saying “Thanks to me! I spent lotsa money and made it all better! Me! It was me!” and a little behind him you’ll see Nassim Nicholas Taleb shaking his head and tutting), but it gave Rudd and Co. licence to spend even more money “building the Education Revolution”, which was code for building several thousand Julia Gillard Memorial School Halls and not giving a rat’s rear about whether the money was actually spent effectively (which in many public schools it apparently hasn’t, if the commercial news channels are to be believed).
3. The Big League Table
Julia Gillard declared the MySchool website a huge success, apparently on the basis that a lot of people logged on to see what the fuss was about. The air was heavy with buzzwords like "transparency" and "informed parents", but mention league tables and you could expect Ms Gillard to keep you in at recess for a good haraguing.
But let's be honest - what is the MySchool website but a digitised league table on steroids, reducing schools down to a small set of numbers and then drawing up a set of dodgy comparisons based on badly flawed socio-economic measurements.
4. The Big Curriculum
The government has released the Draft National Curriculum - or, to be precise, about one-third of one. Rudd and Gillard have described it as “back to basics”, which in the English components means more phonics, phonetics and grammar, but less literature; in the Mathematics components, we apparently will now be using calculators from Kindergarten, but not teaching the 7 times tables. (What the...? An oversight, surely. Would you believe...?)
But what has really been achieved?
The laptops have arrived in most schools, which are now dealing with issues of management, networking and maintenance (and the budgetary headaches that come with that), as well as needing to inservice teachers in how to use them in the classroom. The Federal government has 'generously' decided that the States need to deal with these issues (and the money).
There are schools all across the country in various states of chaos as building projects grind slowly on, quite a number of them apparently not what the schools really wanted or needed, and many apparently costing far more than they ought to.
Journalists and politicians have fallen over themselves about the MySchool website, enthralled by having ready access to something they can understand - "this school's better than that school, because the numbers say so". Sadly, some parents appear to be falling for this dreck as well.
The curriculum is set to be introduced in 2011 - whether schools and teachers are ready or not. And the indications are - not. The various teachers’ unions have publicly raised the issue, but the government still hasn’t talked to them. How do you introduce a curriculum and not talk to the people you expect to implement it?
Is it a curriculum for the 21st century? By my reading, not really. It’s still firmly welded to the 20th century, in keeping with a federal government that still clings to the ‘factory’ model of education and regards it as essentially a tool for increasing economic productivity.
(Interestingly, Edward de Bono has commented on the curriculum, criticising it for not including thinking skills. Yes, this has been de Bono’s soapbox for nearly two decades, and thus his criticism is hardly surprising, but in the era of the Internet, could anything be more critical than thinking skills?)
Looking at what has been put in place, and comparing it to what governments have done in the area of education over the last three or four decades, the only significant difference is that in this instance, it’s been a federal government rather than a state one that has delivered an unbalanced set of resources, mismanaged taxpayers’ dollars and implemented curriculum changes that don’t quite hit the mark.
Round and round we go.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
On the Threshold
2009 comes to a close. Many a new year's resolution will be made and subsequently broken or forgotten.
What of my intentions for 2010? Here's a quick list:
Neapolitan ice-cream - just say no!
People who spend January talking about the start of the new decade - resist the urge to slap them silly.
Read more. Write more.
Turn off the telly.
Dissociate lap and laptop.
Enough.
What of my intentions for 2010? Here's a quick list:
Neapolitan ice-cream - just say no!
People who spend January talking about the start of the new decade - resist the urge to slap them silly.
Read more. Write more.
Turn off the telly.
Dissociate lap and laptop.
Enough.
Saturday, November 07, 2009
Playing in the Snow
Recently I upgraded my laptop to Snow Leopard. From Tiger. Bypassed Leopard completely.
Stupid is as stupid does.
My reason for making the jump up was simple - there were apps (or upgrades to apps) that I wanted to use that needed Leopard. But Snow Leopard was out, and the upgrade disk I tried for Leopard had failed, so Snow Leopard was tried and upgraded successfully. And now I'm gradually finding all the things that have broken in the process.
Registrations of various apps have gone AWOL. My Fink set-up is broken - I expected that, but it may be a while before a number of packages I want are ready for SL. FruitMenu doesn't work. Spotlight comments have been wiped. Dashboard seems to be completely borked.
Those last few have been the most painful. I had a number of things in FruitMenu that I used more than I realised. Same with Dashboard. You don't know what you've got till it's gone (as someone once sang).
At least I've found a (partial) alternative to FruitMenu that I can live with: XMenu. It sits in the top right corner, so I'm gradually learning to change sides, but it works well.
The Spotlight comments issue is the biggest pain, in conjunction with the fact that QuickSilver (which I'm now addicted to) has some issues under SL, namely that certain advanced options, like the File Tagging module, cause QS to crash. I had been using QS's tagging options to keep a lot of stuff organised. Now those tags (stored as spotlight comments) are gone - %$#@!
I can work around the lack of the File Tagging module to some extent using Automator to add my common tags. But this is quite limited compared to what could be done with QS's File Tagging module.
Still, overall I'm pretty happy with Snow Leopard. And when I get time, I'll be able to find solutions that suit the way I like to work. When you play in the snow, you have to expect the odd chilblain.
Stupid is as stupid does.
My reason for making the jump up was simple - there were apps (or upgrades to apps) that I wanted to use that needed Leopard. But Snow Leopard was out, and the upgrade disk I tried for Leopard had failed, so Snow Leopard was tried and upgraded successfully. And now I'm gradually finding all the things that have broken in the process.
Registrations of various apps have gone AWOL. My Fink set-up is broken - I expected that, but it may be a while before a number of packages I want are ready for SL. FruitMenu doesn't work. Spotlight comments have been wiped. Dashboard seems to be completely borked.
Those last few have been the most painful. I had a number of things in FruitMenu that I used more than I realised. Same with Dashboard. You don't know what you've got till it's gone (as someone once sang).
At least I've found a (partial) alternative to FruitMenu that I can live with: XMenu. It sits in the top right corner, so I'm gradually learning to change sides, but it works well.
The Spotlight comments issue is the biggest pain, in conjunction with the fact that QuickSilver (which I'm now addicted to) has some issues under SL, namely that certain advanced options, like the File Tagging module, cause QS to crash. I had been using QS's tagging options to keep a lot of stuff organised. Now those tags (stored as spotlight comments) are gone - %$#@!
I can work around the lack of the File Tagging module to some extent using Automator to add my common tags. But this is quite limited compared to what could be done with QS's File Tagging module.
Still, overall I'm pretty happy with Snow Leopard. And when I get time, I'll be able to find solutions that suit the way I like to work. When you play in the snow, you have to expect the odd chilblain.
Friday, July 03, 2009
In a League of Their Own
The last few weeks have seen further wrangling between politicians over the publication of league tables comparing schools. The NSW Opposition combined with the Greens and minor parties to push an amendment blocking newspapers from publishing tables comparing school performance data.
The Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard and her NSW counterpart Verity Firth naturally took a swipe at the New South Wales Opposition Leader Barry O'Farrell, calling him hypocritical and accusing him of "political vandalism" and calling the move "a ploy that did nothing to benefit schools".
While this response was quite predictable, it does rather beg the question. Does the publication of such tables really benefit schools? A scan of some recent letters to the SMH reveals some interesting ideas "out there" such as this offering from one Lydia Sharpin:
O'Farrell's position doesn't exactly excite me either: "What we support are parents getting information about their child, about their child's school and their child's school's performance against the state average and against like schools." [Link] This really isn't very far from the Commonwealth's plan to publish results about 'similar' schools. Similar in what way? The likely measure here is socio-economic, but the current methods used by the Commonwealth for determining the socio-economic level of schools are badly flawed. And is socio-economic really the most appropriate measure?
However, the biggest problem (in my opinion, at least) lies in how the public understands the situation. Filtered through TV sound bites and jejune summations by newspaper columnists, the public ends up with a caricature instead of a proper understanding of what the issues really are, which in turn leads to these kinds of comments:
The politicians who are for league tables keep talking about transparency. But why should transparency necessitate the publishing of league tables? If the Commonwealth required that all schools make their results from various tests publicly available, wouldn't that be transparent enough? Schools would no doubt also put up a lot of other data about their school, filling out the picture of what their school is like, and isn't that a good thing? Won't parents be better informed by this, rather than simply looking at a table of figures comparing results on tests? Verity Firth keeps trotting out the same canard:
Maybe the teachers unions should fight fire with fire and propose the publication of league tables for politicians - number of divisions voted on, attendance rates, number of days actually spent in the electorate, whether or not the member actually lives in the electorate, number of overseas trips, etc. I'm sure we'd all appreciate such full transparency come next election.
The Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard and her NSW counterpart Verity Firth naturally took a swipe at the New South Wales Opposition Leader Barry O'Farrell, calling him hypocritical and accusing him of "political vandalism" and calling the move "a ploy that did nothing to benefit schools".
While this response was quite predictable, it does rather beg the question. Does the publication of such tables really benefit schools? A scan of some recent letters to the SMH reveals some interesting ideas "out there" such as this offering from one Lydia Sharpin:
This is what the real fear is behind league tables - they will lead to the migration of the brightest talents from schools. The better schools will get the better kids and the worst schools will be forced further down the ranking tables, which could then lead to the closure of schools and loss of teachers' jobs. But are we protecting the teachers and schools at the cost of our students' futures? [Link]Personally, I find the suggestion that blocking league tables is about protecting teachers' jobs to be rather short-sighted. While there are students, there will be a need for teachers – exactly where those students and teachers end up may well be affected by the publication of league tables, but Ms Sharpin needs to think it through a bit more. If the "better" schools do get the "better" kids, (and I'm assuming that by better, she is referring to academic results), does that necessarily lead to school closures? If it does, where do the students and teachers go? (They have to go somewhere.) If it doesn't result in school closures, what is the impact on students and staff at those schools identified as underperforming?
O'Farrell's position doesn't exactly excite me either: "What we support are parents getting information about their child, about their child's school and their child's school's performance against the state average and against like schools." [Link] This really isn't very far from the Commonwealth's plan to publish results about 'similar' schools. Similar in what way? The likely measure here is socio-economic, but the current methods used by the Commonwealth for determining the socio-economic level of schools are badly flawed. And is socio-economic really the most appropriate measure?
However, the biggest problem (in my opinion, at least) lies in how the public understands the situation. Filtered through TV sound bites and jejune summations by newspaper columnists, the public ends up with a caricature instead of a proper understanding of what the issues really are, which in turn leads to these kinds of comments:
"For the record this is absolutely no logical reason why schools - as with any other public service - should not be benchmarked against each other to determine the poor performers. Anyone who argues otherwise has a vested interest." [Link]Presumably this person would also expect that police, fire and ambulance stations should be benchmarked against each other and the results published so he can work out which suburbs he should avoid living in or visiting.
The politicians who are for league tables keep talking about transparency. But why should transparency necessitate the publishing of league tables? If the Commonwealth required that all schools make their results from various tests publicly available, wouldn't that be transparent enough? Schools would no doubt also put up a lot of other data about their school, filling out the picture of what their school is like, and isn't that a good thing? Won't parents be better informed by this, rather than simply looking at a table of figures comparing results on tests? Verity Firth keeps trotting out the same canard:
"Providing more information about schools' performance is not about naming and shaming schools, it is about helping and supporting schools ... Full transparency will enable us to channel resources to those schools that need them most." [Link]
Except that identifying where the needs are and channelling resources doesn't require publication of anything!
Maybe the teachers unions should fight fire with fire and propose the publication of league tables for politicians - number of divisions voted on, attendance rates, number of days actually spent in the electorate, whether or not the member actually lives in the electorate, number of overseas trips, etc. I'm sure we'd all appreciate such full transparency come next election.
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
Thank You, Dan Mesa
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