Category: Educational
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On informed personal choice
Over the last few months, I have frequently been asked where I stood on the subject of vaccinations. My standard reply has always been: informed personal choice. I still stand by this. Over the course of the last ten years of so, main media channels have certainly had the opportunity to mis-represent my stance, so…
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Easter… and meditative practice
I was reminded only recently how far societal change has moved, and how distant and disconnected so many have become to spiritual understanding of festivals, commemorations, and various practices. Easter is probably an excellent example. Even amongst the privately (and that speaks volumes!) religious, unless directly engaged within the confines of the religiously minded community,…
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On the educational merits of student financial vouchers
It was refreshing to open the year with a post from Moshe Feiglin (an Israeli parliamentarian) writing the following within a post titled ‘Moshe Feiglin: Instead of Censoring Books, Let Parents Take Responsibility‘: “Give the money (that you took from Israel’s citizens) to the parents in the form of vouchers worth 4,000 NIS per month…
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Wilful Web Woes
Over the last few years, I have used two different servers on which to host the various sites I have (or sub-host on behalf of others). It seems like some maliciously intended people have managed to get in to one of the servers (owned by a UK-based company, but maintained in the USA) and caused…
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Australian National Curriculum Review
I have (finally) added a page with a copy of my late-night submission to the review of the so-called Australian National Curriculum. I say ‘so-called’, as there is, of course, no such thing, nor should there be! For ease of reference, the page is on my main fourhares site: Australian National Curriculum Review (a pdf…
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Two US-based conferences…
Here are two conferences to which, each year, I look to and, as usual, am unable to participate… this year precisely a month apart. Semiotic Society of America The annual conference of the Semiotic Society of America taking place, this year, in Seattle between the 2nd and 5th of October: RunRev’s LiveCode 2014 The other…
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Why Children Shouldn’t have the World at their Fingertips
The following originally appeared in Orion Magazine – well worth a read as a counter-balance to the all too common push towards extreme impulses. By Lowell Monke* THOMAS EDISON WAS A GREAT INVENTOR but a lousy prognosticator. When he proclaimed in 1922 that the motion picture would replace textbooks in schools, he began a long…
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Policies are not just policies
Of late given the Australian elections, I’ve engaged in something that I otherwise on the whole consider a waste of time: tweets. Part of the problem with tweets is that one is restricted to 140 characters: whether or not this can genuinely be called ‘micro-blogging’ or not, it certainly encourages depth of neither reflection nor…
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Election day chart
or why consulting an astrologer may be useful prior to calling an election I had known since prior to the election that the date coincided with Mercury beginning a retrograde motion, and had thought at the time this was not a good time for any election. The results, however, simply did not only reflect a…
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In a nutshell: how our system of government works.
Given the 2010 Federal election results (still pending), I’ve received (from both local and o/s) queries about how our Australian system of government works, so I thought I’d try and give a very brief overview, with inevitable small ‘errors of exception’. Firstly, we are a Federated Commonwealth of States. In some ways, this is somewhat…