My #reading October 2016

The upgrading of humans into gods may follow any of three paths: biological engineering, cyborg engineering and the engineering of non-organic beings. …in an upgraded world you will feel like a Neanderthal hunter in Wall Street. You won’t belong. I read Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari on my kindle and highlighted […]

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The KFC Fix

“The 2016 results show reading scores have increased by 0.4 per cent since 2013, writing scores have declined by 0.2 per cent and numeracy scores have risen by 1.26 per cent. Over the same time period, federal school funding has increased by 23.7 per cent.”   Federal Minister for Education, 2016             […]

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My #reading: July 2016

Historians indeed hope that their books might entwine intimately with the lives of their readers and that their histories may sit on bedside tables ready to enter dreams. History – that unending dialogue between the present and the past – is essential to human consciousness. It is conducted as part of the daily business of […]

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A big task!

Greg Whitby is the only very senior educationalist that I know in NSW who regularly uses social media and blogging to highlight his educational beliefs and values. Greg has blogged, tweeted and generally participated in online discussions for as long as social media has been a concept. He is enthusiastic about technology or rather, how […]

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My #reading: June 2016

“This is to be a sort of diary or book of notes. When I have finished filling these pages, I shall burn them. But if they should happen to survive, lets hope they fall into the hands of some curiosity-driven chatterbox of a writer; what’s it to me? The world concerns me not at all, […]

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NSW Premier’s Teacher Scholarship Study Tour: San Francisco #4

San Francisco is a wonderful city to explore with many homes and buildings having memorable architecture.  Tacy Trowbridge hosted my visit to Adobe in San Francisco (located in an amazing building). Tacy is Head of Adobe’s Education Programs and I had the privilege of meeting with her team including Johnson Fung and Terry Fortescue. Tacy, formerly an English and […]

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NSW Premier’s Teacher Scholarship Study Tour: New York #2

“From its inception, a PDS education was founded on relationships and learning by doing; it valued play as creative cognitive growth and working together as a means of effective progress and the promotion of democratic values. It was about openness to opportunity and growth rather than right answers and closed minds.” Visiting schools is always […]

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My #reading April 2016

Every day I work on the edit of my book. I slog away, shifting chunks of material and moving them back, eating my salad in a daze, wondering if the linking passages I’ve written are leading me up a garden path, or are sentimental, or violate some unarticulated moral and technical code I’ve signed up […]

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My #reading: February 2016

“We are creatures made as much by art as by experience and what we read in books is the sum of both.”  Andy Miller “I wanted to possess all the books I had already read, as well as all those I had not – every book in the whole wide world, in other words.”  Andy Miller  Filmish: […]

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September-October 2015: My Reading

But only literature can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettinesses, its obsessions, its beliefs; with whatever it finds moving, interesting, exciting or repugnant. Only literature can give you access to a spirit from beyond the grave – a more direct, […]

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The State of the Birds (Citizen Science)

The long-term goal of this project is to establish a set of bird indices for all major Australian bird groups, so that future SOAB reports can also report on indices for shorebirds, waterbirds and seabirds.                                         […]

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Resources for Citizen Science

The Maximising the Capacity of Citizen Science for Science and Society conference run by the Australian Citizen Science Association has showcased a wide range of projects and resources that will be useful to educators and citizen science enthusiasts. I thought I’d share some links and information: Biodiversity Snapshots is a useful resource for students/teachers to work in the classroom before […]

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Subscribe?

Why do people still pay to subscribe to magazines, journals, websites and newspapers? For some time, to subscribe, one has entered an email address or added the website as an RSS feed for an endless stream of online articles and posts. I subscribe to about a thousand websites using Feedly. In another sense, we subscribe by clicking ‘like’ or […]

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June 2015: My Reading

“…by writing about himself, Knausgaard has really written about them, that reading ‘My Struggle’ is like opening someone else’s diary and finding your own secrets.”                                                             […]

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Northern Lights: The Positive Policy Example

This book is written in the belief that the nations of Scandinavia and Finland, or Nordic Europe*, do continue to provide important living proof that economically successful, socially fair and environmentally responsible policies can succeed. Northern Lights: The Positive Policy Example of Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway by Andrew Scott will brighten our national mood, […]

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The Professional and the Personal

Back in 2008, Martin Weller’s video, A Twitter Love Song, captured the potential of social media to be the ‘sweet spot’, a kind of comfortable marriage of the personal with the professional. This ‘subjective’ video message of Martin’s really appealed at the time (and still does). This, I think it is fair to warn you, is a […]

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Charging Windmills: My Reading in 2014

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.” George R.R. Martin “I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.” Sylvia Plath “I don’t remember ever […]

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Travelling Norse

It was a wonderful autumn day, cold and bright; as we drove inland from Bergen in the morning, frozen mist was lying over the fjord. The trees on the mountainsides were displaying red and yellow leaves, the fjord below was like a millpond, the waterfalls immense and white.      Karl Ove Knausgaard We are […]

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I Voted!

There have been many posts about our school’s nurturing democracy program over the last few years at my blog, including this one about our plan to hold formal elections conducted by the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC). Today, we made significant progress in assisting students to learn about how preferential voting works in our country as almost 900 […]

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“An upper-class school”

A comment – as I negotiated customs at Sydney Airport with a large party of students on their way to visit our sister school in Korea – keeps swirling round in my mind. The official scanning bags engaged me in small-talk asking where we were headed. When I explained our excursion was to Korea to […]

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Our Urgent Need for an Ethical Education

What ought one to do?      Socrates I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.      Albert Einstein A quiet conscience makes one strong!      Anne Frank Do you believe Australia has great need of […]

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