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You Better Start Swimmin? or You?ll Sink Like a Stone
2009-09-04 01:18:00
Today I “attended” an educational technologies conference. Well sort of. I wasn’t there, but then again, I was. IWBnet’s “Leading a Digital School” conference was on at the Gold Coast in sunny Queensland and while I was unable to be a delegate at the venue, I had the next best thing. Many of the delegates ...
More About: Internet , Life , My Thoughts , Start , Stone

Is this Technically the Best 1:1 Rollout in the World?
2009-08-20 01:34:00
October 20, 2007 - Australian Opposition Leader, Kevin Rudd is on the election campaign trail making a promise that made state governments, educational authorities and teachers shudder in their boots. While holding up a laptop which he referred to as “the toolbox of the 21st Century“, he promised to provide a computer to every high school student ...
More About: Internet , Life , World , My Thoughts , Lenovo

Which Teachers Should get a T1 Laptop?
2009-06-26 12:59:00
The initial rollout of Laptop Computers as part of the New South Wales Digital Education Revolution is pretty clear-cut when it comes to students – ALL year 9 students will get one this year.  But when it comes to teachers, the T1 rollout sees high schools receiving enough to cover only one-third of their staff. This begs ...
More About: Laptops , Learning , Teachers

Lifelong Learning is NOT a 9 to 5 Job
2009-06-14 09:09:00
Late last year I attended my son’s high school graduation where speech after speech espoused the knowledge and skills that the Class of 2008 have gained over their thirteen years of schooling. As the students prepared for the next phase of their lives, it was heartening to hear that they all had been instilled with ...
More About: Internet , Learning

I, Cyberbully.
2009-05-29 13:56:00
I’m not sure I quite remember when and how it started. He was just another boy in my class. But it seemed that everything he did just grated on me. No, I don’t want to listen to your music. Hell, that’s a stupid haircut. Put your hand down and shutup for god’s sake. I’m gonna ...
More About: Internet , Life

What ICT Teachers Think?
2009-05-20 15:32:00
EVERY School Term for the past ten years, in conjunction with my team, I have been running Information Days for school ICT Coordinators. Over 250 teachers representing over 200 public schools consistently come to find out the latest information relating to ICT in school education in our little part of the world. Now while I’m usually the ...
More About: Internet , Teachers

Uh oh. I think I have Swine Flu?
2009-04-30 14:12:00
I had a little nap after work, and when I awoke, I found myself covered in rashers. On the news they showed up the phone number for the Swine Flu information line, so I rang them up to get some advice. Problem was I couldn’t make out a word they were saying. All I heard ...
More About: Humor

Still Waiting for the Revolution?
2009-01-26 11:40:00
Date Log: January 2009. Still waiting for the revolution. Australia’s Digital Education Revolution is coming. Even before it started, it was identified that the $1.2 billion promised was not going to be enough, so now with the injection of a further $807 million, Educational Authorities across the country are investigating hardware options including laptops and wireless connectivity. But ...
More About: Internet , Waiting , The Revolution

?Clickers? or ?Virtual Clickers??
2009-01-08 14:18:00
For a few years now, Personal Response Systems (PRS) and Student Response Systems (SRS) have been making major inroads into classrooms and lecture halls, particularly in Universities and Colleges.  These ?clicker? systems literally put engagement, motivation, participation and instant feedback into the palm of each student?s hand. In most classrooms today, the teacher asks a question ...
More About: Virtual , Phil

?in my Spare Time, I write Software.
2008-08-17 03:33:00
That’s what I’ve been doing lately instead of writing more articles here at Parallel Divergence. So I thought I’d share with you my latest hobby project. It’s called Stu’s Double Jeopardy! version 3.1 - and as usual, it’s completely free for anyone who wants it. For a free product, it’s actually quite impressive and it’s already ...
More About: Software , Internet , Time , Write

Australia?s Digital Education Revolution?
2008-06-01 10:46:00
NOT LONG after Kevin Rudd’s Labor Party was whisked into power in Australia after 12 years of conservative government, there were immediate and obvious differences that appeared. Rudd took no traditional “honeymoon” period, instead preferring to get straight to work on delivering his pre-election promises. One of these being the $1.2 billion “Digital Education Revolution “. During the ...
More About: Internet , Life

Games With A Purpose
2008-05-17 13:02:00
Humans compute very differently to computers. Knowledge, Intelligence and Wisdom are not terms often attributed to computers. The closest descriptors in the computer world are Data, Processors and Recursion. They’re just not the same. A human could quickly look at a photograph and immediately identify all the elements in it - a man, a woman, a park bench, ...
More About: Internet , Games , Purpose , Phil

Still Interested in a Class Blog?
2008-04-22 15:15:00
If you’re still listening, I’ll assume you’re still interested in creating a class blog at your school. In part one, we concentrated on WHY teachers and schools should be blogging. In part two, we looked at WHAT had to be done to ensure student privacy and security. Now, in this third instalment of the class ...
More About: Internet , Web 2 , Blog , Class , Phil

Getting Started with Class Blogs
2008-04-21 13:30:00
In the article “Why Teachers and Schools Should be Blogging“, I discussed the reasons and benefits of blogging in the classroom, but for the blogging-novice, there are student privacy, security and policy concerns that must be considered. Assuming you took notice of the content of that first article, this one will take you through the first ...
More About: Internet , Life , Web 2 , Blogs , Class

Why Teachers and Schools Should be Blogging
2008-04-12 09:48:00
MANY of our students leave school in the afternoon and go straight on-line as soon as they get home. They immediately start chatting with their friends on MSN, often holding down multiple conversations at the same time, seamlessly changing subjects and maintaining discussion threads as they swap from one chat window to the next.  Their ...
More About: Internet , Life , Schools , Web 2 , Blogging

The Needle and the Damage Done
2008-03-02 04:20:00
The unexpected demise of famous young people due to “accidental” drug overdoses has dotted modern history. Janis Joplin, John Belushi, River Phoenix, Kurt Cobain, and Heath Ledger all succumbed to an addiction that snatched away their lives when they were in their prime. While crystal-meth, crack and ecstasy are now the most “popular” of illicit ...
More About: Music , Life , Neil Young , Damage

Heath Ledger: Dead at 28
2008-01-22 23:43:00
January 22 2008: What a shocking, tragic waste. An all too stunning but brief spectacle - like a meteorite that flashes across the midnight sky. At only 28 years of age, a young man in the prime of his emerging career is dead. What can you say? What can anyone say? You keep clicking Refresh on ...
More About: Movies , Life , Heath Ledger , Dead , Ledger

SHOCKING - or De-sensitizing?
2007-12-02 09:47:00
GOVERNMENTS and authorities around the world have been using shock tactics in ”Public Service Announcements” for several years now, but their use of graphic advertising has been on the increase. Certainly, it is universally acknowledged that smoking, driving without a seat belt and drugs are dangerous and carry certain risks, but it seems the public needs to ...
More About: Internet , Life

Brad & Phil?s Information R/evolution
2007-11-25 03:53:00
In early 2007, I discovered an amazingly-constructed video on YouTube by Dr Michael Wesch, an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. The title of his video is “The Machine is Us/ing Us” and in under 5 minutes he managed to grab my attention like nothing else in recent times.  If you’ve never ...
More About: Humor , Internet , Information , Life , Evolution

Microsoft Vista Overtakes Apple OSX in Only Eight Months
2007-10-02 15:38:00
Microsoft Vista was released publicly and globally on January 30, 2007 and it’s taken only eight months for this troubled operating system to overtake Apple ’s computer flagships, the iMac and OSX. In fact, as the graph below indicates, percentage-wise, Apple has either been stagnant or declining over the past five months while in the same ...
More About: Internet , Microsoft , Phil

How ?Spirit? Killed God?
2007-09-16 14:40:00
MARCH 2004: On the 63rd Martian Day of its tour of duty, the Mars Rover “Spirit ” raises its “eye” skyward and captures a series of mosaics of the horizon just one hour before sunrise to produce another symbolic nail in the coffin of God . Those images combined to form the first image ever taken of Earth from the ...
More About: Life , My Thoughts

Unique and Complex Passwords for Everything
2007-08-19 11:54:00
When we were children, our “world” was a very small place. Everything that I knew was within a five-kilometer radius of my home. From time to time, I would catch a bus or a train that would take me out of my world, and into another. My little circular world was joined by a line ...
More About: Life , Unique , Complex , Nique , Swords

The Private Lives of Google Street View
2007-06-03 14:23:00
I believe Google wants to be ubiquitous. It’s the world’s favorite search engine, cataloging every nook and cranny of the Internet  and boasts more than 380 million unique visitors every month. Google’s AdSense and AdWords are “widely recognized as the Web’s most efficient advertising vehicles”. It now owns the world’s most popular video-sharing site, YouTube as well as the ...
More About: Life , Earth , Google Earth

Creation Museum Madness?
2007-04-28 08:04:00
May 28, 2007: The intelligence of Man takes a giant leap backward, into the Middle Ages, with the opening of the “Creation Muse um ” in Petersburg, Kentucky where it seems not only is the Bible 100% correct, but so were The Flintstones. If it wasn’t so serious, it would be laughable.   Such incredible visionaries were Bill Hanna ...
More About: Life , God , Earth

The Best Fool is an April Fool!
2007-03-28 14:43:00
I was looking at a calendar the other day and realised April 1st is coming up again. I’m not usually the kind that plays pranks on others, but it reminded me of one day many years ago when I did exactly that on my family. Don’t worry, it’s nothing as lame (athough effective) as wrapping ...
More About: Fool , Best

Swing with Me? Please?
2007-03-23 11:24:00
Most democratic nations hold open elections regularly - usually every three or four years. Most democratic nations also only have two major parties vying to form government. As democratic nations mature, the two major parties tend to move from a traditional left-wing/right-wing battle to an almost converged state where on many platforms there is little ...
More About: With , Wing , Please , Swing , Lease

The Inflation of Earth?
2007-03-03 23:43:05
When I went to school, one subject I really enjoyed was Geology - the study of the Earth , the materials of which it is made, the structure of those materials, and the processes acting upon them. I also loved reading comic books and admiring the wonderful artists that produced the amazing pieces of artwork that filled each comic.  But never in my wildest dreams did I think that a comic book artist would destroy the foundation of my understanding of the geology of our planet. But that’s exactly what one comic book artist has done.  The above diagrams represented my “knowledge” of how the Earth formed, from the single landmass of Pangaea which violently broke apart 225 million years ago forming Laurasia and Gondwanaland. These further broke apart into about twelve separate plates which, over all those millions of years, have drifted and come to form the continents as we know them today. Of course, my “knowledge” was provided to me by others - teachers and...
More About: Inflation , Flat

OLPC: The Revolution Begins?
2007-02-17 17:33:03
In February 2007, the first of almost 2,500 “$150 Laptops” will be rolled out to school children in the poorest areas of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Nigeria, Libya, Rwanda and Cambodia. The ambitious “One Laptop Per Child” (OLPC) project was first devised in January 2005 with the concept of producing an affordable laptop computer specifically for the poorest and most-remote children in the world. Just two years and several prototypes later, the impressive lime-green and white “Children’s Machine” dubbed the XO is almost ready for mass-production. The XO is offered for sale only to the governments of countries for distribution on a one-for-one basis to children by each nation’s educational authority. The OLPC association has received orders for one million units to date and is preparing for a production schedule of five million units this coming July. A further fifty million XOs are expected to be produced in 2008, when the unit price ...
More About: Evolution , Revolution , The Revolution

Where is Humanity for A Girl Like Me?
2007-01-27 17:16:05
When people run a project, an essential part of the success of that project is ongoing review. What did we do right? What did we do wrong? What could we have done better? Those evaluations and recommendations then must be applied to future projects to ensure progress. Why as a society would we not apply that same concept to our children? While it is our job to teach children, we must also listen to them and learn from them. The old principle, “Children should be seen and not heard” is akin to placing blinkers on a society’s future. Certainly, our children are precious and need nurturing, but their thoughts and perceptions are also direct evidence of what they have learned from us and should never be ignored. One of these children, 17 year-old Kiri Davis, a high school student from New York, decided to make a short documentary in 2006 to capture the thoughts and perceptions of her peers and even from infants in her neighborhood. In the 1940s an experiment was condu...
More About: Human , Mani , Girl , Humanity , Here

Watch out Firefox - Here Comes Maxthon!
2007-01-12 05:08:03
In the most recent count by the respected W3Counter Global Web Stats, Fire fox in all its versions and flavors, has hit a very respectable 25% market share in just two short years since the version 1.0 release. This rapid rise has been on the back of the history of a ubiquitous Microsoft Internet Explorer stumbling through a series of major security breaches, ignorance of World Wide Web Consortium standards and a lack of upgrades. Firefox has also benefitted from a grass roots, sometimes almost militant campaign against IE to “Take Back the Web”, driven by developers and the blogosphere. Meanwhile, pre-dating Firefox by a few years, a solo university student in Beijing, China who called himself ”Changyou“, decided he wanted to make Internet Explorer better.  His development was called MyIE. Following in the footsteps of NetCaptor, released a year earlier, the first version of MyIE included tabbed-browsing. But on top of this great innovation he implemented ma...
More About: Watch , Come , Here