Uni chief says ‘charge students more’

Just a couple of days after I was lamenting with a friend the death of free university education since the heady post-Whitlam days, and the subsequent changes to campus life, along comes the ‘uni chief’ today in the AGE, arguing that universities should be given the power to set higher student fees, ostensibly to help [...]

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Back to school!

Just as I feared, the reminders are coming thick and fast, but now I’m almost looking forward to getting back to work and school and over the beautiful unreality of holiday life!

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Taking my own advice…

Examples below of me taking my own advice about integrating myself into summer. I just had 10 days in the Marlborough Sounds in NZ, followed by a few days camping at the Prom. Both were great. Now I’m dreading that first ‘Back to School’ sale sign any day now. And I logged into to my [...]

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No comment necessary

From the AGE today: AUSTRALIA was the only developed country to cut public spending on tertiary education in the decade to 2004, according to a new world comparison. The funding reduction — down 4 per cent compared with an average OECD rise of 49 per cent — resulted in private spending on higher education, including [...]

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NASA TV (repost)

Okay, so now I’m re-posting from old postings, but I was thinking about watching the space shuttle on my laptop computer again and how amazing that actually is. I blogged just that sentiment a couple of years ago but it was on the old blog (I didn’t know about migrating posts over in those days) [...]

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Schools should teach more oz-lit

This week the focus was Australian literature, and what schools should be doing about it. A Sydney seminar was responding to Rosemary Neill’s article in the Weekend Australian late last year called, ‘Lost for Words’, which argued that university undergraduates were much less interested in studying Australian writing than in the past. Various theories emerged. [...]

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The Truth about HECS

Given that I went to university in the halcyon days when it was prioritized by government, I hate to see the path it’s gone down since. So I was interested to read Dick Gunstone, Professor of Science and Technology Education at Monash University systematically dismantle Peter Costello’s recent declaration that: “Well let me put it [...]

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Generation HECS

A nice comment in the AGE editorial today, commenting on the Rudd proposal to cut the accumulated HECS debt of a science and maths graduate from more than $21000 to $12000, especially if they worked in a ‘relevant’ occupation, in particular teaching and asking, ‘why just science?’ Given that universities are a nation’s grand halls [...]

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