The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed (link resides outside of ibm.com). - William Gibson, quoted in The Economist, December 4, 2003

'The future is already here' and this oft (over) quoted line from the father of cyberpunk (link resides outside of ibm.com) accurately relays how Australian children must often feel about their community's approach to their schooling.

Choose any time of the school day and the majority of Australian children currently sit at desks with no access to the internet. Quite simply, this is an unnacceptable situation that can be remedied quickly, with political and community will.

Most Australians would agree that decisions designed to win short term party political advantage do not create conditions conducive for improving community learning outcomes. In fact, many of these expedient decisions have the very opposite effect, negatively impacting on learning in our schools and the wider community.

Recent 'action' designed to improve Australian education focuses on a new national curriculum (link resides outside of ibm.com), funding to improve teacher quality (link resides outside of ibm.com) through paying bonuses, websites (link resides outside of ibm.com) and standardised testing (link resides outside of ibm.com) designed to improve accountability and transparency.

Unfortunately, the Digital Education Revolution (link resides outside of ibm.com), the most enlightened of government policies, has had funding slashed (link resides outside of ibm.com) in the recent federal budget. This is a travesty!

What can we do?

There are some very clear policy actions that can be taken to set the scene for sustainable, sensible future directions in Australian education:

1. Ubiquitous wireless access to the internet with each student having a mobile device
2. New credentials based on assessment/portfolio rather than pen and paper exams
3. Personalised learning for all students in a more flexible, less factory-like environment
4. A 'new' style of 'teaching' that is about 'learning' and being a 'learner'

A radical suggestion, to re-purpose school sites (link resides outside of ibm.com) into 'community' spaces with completely flexible learning arrangements, that place emphasis on the individual attaining the qualifications needed, is what could evolve if we start to think about 'learning' and individual responsibility rather than our current factory-models of education (link resides outside of ibm.com), with all their limitations.

In short, we equate education with schooling and learning is neglected. The abundance of resources available and people to connect with online fundamentally changes the game of learning. More self-directed and personalised learning is achievable due to this abundance.

Informally polling (link resides outside of ibm.com) my colleagues reveals they overwhelmingly believe that personalising learning is the BIG IDEA for our immediate future if we are to improve learning for young people. I agree! All policy and funding decisions should be made to enable this idea!

It is essential that young people have community spaces to gather and learn, create and grow. However, we need to rethink many of our education 'norms'. Advocates of using video game design in education (link resides outside of ibm.com), gamification (link resides outside of ibm.com) or Project Based Learning (link resides outside of ibm.com) or other progressive models all believe that students need to be transliterate (link resides outside of ibm.com),not just traditionally literate (link resides outside of ibm.com). Cultural literacy (link resides outside of ibm.com), in a wider sense than what ED Hirsch (link resides outside of ibm.com) suggests, is also essential, for teachers to stay 'current', as well as students (who need a sense of 'the past'). Who decides what is culturally relevant? I'd suggest we all do rather than a narrow vision from a syllabus/curriculum.

Eat - Sleep – Hydrate.

A very simple, yet profoundly important issue which must not be forgotten as we reform, is our community well-being. We must ensure that students are savvy digital citizens but also sleeping, eating sensibly and well-hydrated. It would shock many of our political leaders to see the percentage of students who do not eat breakfast or drink water at all. We often see statistics on teen suicide, mental health issues or family-breakdown but rarely about these basics of existence.

Distributing the future more evenly in an effort to have excellent 'education systems' will be less about 'schooling' and more about 'learning'. That means all of us - not just the children!

Darcy Moore is a blogger and educator focused on the future of learning in the 21st century. This interest in education is professional but having children, aged 5 and 7 years, takes his passion for reform to an entirely deeper level. Darcy currently works as a deputy principal in a state school in NSW and will spend much of the rest of the year in Denmark, on an educational leadership exchange. He has a deep interest in the way social media has the power to democratise creative endeavour and form connections with an incredibly wide array of talented people. Darcy is also keen photographer.

The views expressed at this post are his own and do not represent those of his employer.

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Has anyone seen my Boom?

At the end of 2010, the accepted wisdom was that Australia had seen off the "GFC", and that "The Mother of All Booms" was coming our way, courtesy of our exports to China and the staggering level of investment needed to sustain them. Growth would exceed 4 percent, unemployment would fall below 4 percent, and the RBA would need to increase rates to constrain inflation.

Then the economy went backwards by 1.2% in the March Quarter. Growth over the year remained positive, but it was below the 3% level needed to guarantee falling unemployment--and it appeared to be headed down, not up.

The standard explanation for such unexpected outcomes, given by the "Neoclassical" economists who dominate the economics profession, is that some "exogenous shock" hit the economy. This time, there was an obvious one: the huge floods in Queensland that shut many mines. These economists remain confident that, now that the water has subsided, The Mother Boom will come roaring back, and rates will have to rise to contain inflation.

Others are not so sure--especially retailers, who complain that the shoppers just aren't shopping. Certainly, conflicting data abounds: falling full-time employment, weak retail figures, inflation rising yet below expectations. The term "two speed economy" has become part of the vernacular. This Mother, it seems, plays favourites, and in the aggregate, the family is doing, if not poorly, then less well than expected.

There is a way to make sense of all this: the economy is being pulled in two different directions by two very different forces--exports and credit. Neoclassical economists, sitting in their Neoclassical armchairs, ignore the second force because, to quote Paul Krugman, "the overall level of debt makes no difference ... one person's liability is another person's asset".

Their reasoning is that debt simply transfers spending power from savers to borrowers, so that the increased spending power of the borrowers is matched by the decreased spending power of the savers. To quote another famous Neoclassical economist, Ben Bernanke, " Absent implausibly large differences in marginal spending propensities among the groups, it was suggested, pure redistributions should have no significant macro-economic effects".

Conventional economists, like those who run the RBA, therefore ignored the blowout in Australian private (business and household) debt that saw it rise from 25% of GDP in the mid-1960s to almost 160% at its peak in early 2008.

That was a profound error of judgment, and it's fundamentally why they didn't see the GFC coming. In the real world, banks don't simply transfer spending power between savers and borrowers: they create spending power by issuing loans. The increase in debt creates money which adds to aggregate demand. Aggregate demand thus has two components: income from selling goods and services, and the change in debt.

Some demand from rising debt is beneficial--because it finances productive investment. But the blowout in debt since the 1960s has financed far more speculation than investment. The economy became addicted to rising debt.

The crisis occurred because the growth in debt stopped--worldwide. Australia "avoided" the GFC partly through a rapid boost to government spending, but mainly because the Government enticed households to return to borrowing once more, with what I call the "First Home Vendors Boost". Mortgage debt, which was on track to grow more slowly than GDP, rose dramatically faster, and added an additional $100 billion to aggregate demand over 2009-2010.

Deleveraging in the rest of the world--especially the USA--meant that debt fell, reducing aggregate demand. In Australia, the change in debt remained positive: we borrowed our way out of trouble.

This trick worked very well for a time. But for it to continue working, debt not only has to rise, but to accelerate. Since aggregate demand is GDP plus the change in debt, the change in aggregate demand is the sum of the change in GDP plus the acceleration of debt. With debt at already unprecedented levels, the acceleration of debt is already petering out--and retailers, who have to sell real armchairs to real people, were the first to notice it.

Unlike the Queensland floods, the negative impact of decelerating debt is not going to go away. Private debt is at unprecedented levels now, and the trend will be for debt to decelerate rather than accelerate.

This implies that the "two speed economy" will be with us for some time. Just as accelerating debt increased aggregate demand by 2% on average between 1993 and 2008, decelerating debt could reduce the growth in aggregate demand by as much from now until private debt has fallen substantially--perhaps to 1990 levels, or even below.

The "Mother of All Booms" will therefore disappoint, because demand from China and mining investment will be weighed down by a deleveraging private sector. All our eggs are therefore in a China basket--and we had better hope that that basket doesn't also contain its own rotten egg of financial speculation.

Steve Keen is Associate Professor of Economics & Finance at the University of Western Sydney, and author of the popular book Debunking Economics (Zed Books UK, 2001; www.debunkingeconomics.com).

Steve predicted the financial crisis as long ago as December 2005, and warned that back in 1995 that a period of apparent stability could merely be “the calm before the storm”. His leading role as one of the tiny minority of economists to both foresee the crisis and warn of it was recognised by his peers when he received the Revere Award from the Real World Economics Review for being the economist who most cogently warned of the crisis, and whose work is most likely to prevent future crises. Steve Keen’s Debtwatch blog can be viewed at http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/.

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Sustainable Futures for our Natural Resources

Australia’s natural resources and mining industries face an uncertain future. A future clouded in the short term by the haze of new taxation regimes, increasing restrictions on new development approvals, and an accelerating pace of growth which other parts of the country and the economy are struggling to match. But also a future shining bright with the promise of longer term demand for our products, technological innovations which will bring news ways of working, and a deeper understanding amongst the Australian people of the value the resources industries bring to the entire country.

Extraction and processing of our natural resources is a non-negotiable part of the way the modern world functions. Government and industry know that resource extraction cannot just stop in its tracks, or even slow down dramatically in any short period of time. It will and must continue for many generations to come.

As a mining engineer myself, it’s my hope that my children and their children alike will still be able to work in the mining and resources industries in Australia in the decades to come. I hope when they arrive on a mine site to be a part of one of the most quintessentially Australian industries that things will have changed a lot for the better, but in many ways still remain the same. I hope the industry has managed to demonstrate to Australia and the world that extraction of our natural resources is not a bad thing, and that it can be done in a sustainable manner. I hope there is new technology, new ways of mining and extraction, and new methods of rehabilitating once we’ve left.

And I also hope that the industry retains its character, its can-do attitude, and its quiet understanding of just how important it is to our country, despite what many vocal parts of the community would try to convince us otherwise.

Resources industries and the government must work together in coming years and decades in a two part approach to protecting and promoting one of our most important assets. Firstly the challenge is to improve the industry’s image and the understanding of the industry and its benefits amongst the general public. Secondly the industry itself must use its extraordinary technological know-how and innovative abilities to find ways to be a more efficient, cleaner, a more socially interactive, and overall a more sustainable industry. Australia has long been a leader in bringing technological advances to the resources industry, leading to valuable productivity and efficiency improvements. We can now depend on the industry to turn these capabilities to efforts aimed at dramatically improving sustainable practices.

So what does the mine of the future look like? Well despite the enthusiasm of many to see the end to mining as we know it, the mine of the future still looks like a hole in the ground, and not a wind turbine or solar farm. But it looks different in the future – it is a quiet, out of sight, green and clean site. There is still a hole in the ground where the minerals have been taken out of, but the hole is much smaller as mining technologies improve our understanding of what’s in the ground, which in turn means we need to take much less away to get the same amount of what we need. Mining in the future has become like keyhole surgery – getting the same result for a much smaller surface impact and disturbance, and leaving the land with a much shorter recovery time.

For the good of our balance economy and future, Australia should not simply become the world’s mining pit at the expense of other industries. But neither should we ignore the vast resources’ wealth we are endowed with -wealth which is valuable to both our economy, and the economies and development of our neighbours. We owe it to them and to ourselves to extract and share this wealth.

The natural resources and mining industries have a bright future in Australia, and much more yet to contribute to the way of life of all Australians and our neighbours. The challenge ahead is to contribute in a sustainable way that protects our nation’s many other assets for the long term – assets like our regional communities, environmental wonders, and the many other industries which make Australia what it is.

Jamie Ross is a passionate and proud member of the Australian mining industry. A mining engineer, Jamie has worked for most of the major mining houses in a range of roles from literally working at the coal face underground, to management positions developing new mining projects in sensitive environmental areas. Now dedicating his working hours to improving safety management and the quality of leadership in the country’s resources projects, he shares his experience and thoughts on his blog at www.miningman.com.

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Connectedness: technology, humans and the future

Because of the rise of digital network technologies, the future of human society is all about connectedness. Our lives are changing dramatically, indeed have already changed, because of it. Connectivity is no longer just having Internet access: being ‘networked’ is now deeply part of our culture and our emotional lives. As we get comfortable with our always-connected state, it becomes part of us in a way that a mere tool can never be.

We now can access (and often must use) software and hardware to create, share and receive information. These technologies permit conversations, collaborations and communities to persist and grow, free from many constraints of time and space. No longer do we need to be in the same place and time to work and play together. And, through network access wherever we are, and powerful mobile computing and communications devices, networked information and communication is becoming ubiquitous.

It is more than just ‘the Internet’, though this meta-network is a very significant part of connectedness. The technologies that make the difference also include digital cameras, audio recorders and players, the ever-present ‘clouds’ of computing power to serve applications and store data, and geo-location services provided by GPS. Databases that store and relate vast quantities of trivial data (often provided unconsciously) also matter: the code is a technology which now defines our way of life.

We sometimes think ‘connectedness’ is about our family, our friends and our workmates. And, truly, the Internet has changed these social relations and where we experience them. We work from home more, we play at work more. We connect with others through countless forms of digital exchange, reaching out to the person across the street, or across the world. Connectedness makes us imagine the world as our backyard: but we are also ‘everywhere’ all at once.

It’s not just about connections to others. We also have a different sort of connection to our own everyday life. We snap pictures, update our status, immediately find a key bit of information to put to use, there and then. Layers of data provided by our computers augment the reality we live. In many ways, we are more connected to ourselves than ever before, even as our connections to others become weaker, but more numerous. We see ourselves, online, as others see us; we see ourselves reflected in the mirror of the screen.

Technologies do not make things different: how humans use and adapt the devices and their applications remains vital. Computing technologies are not replacing humans, nor taking over from them, nor stealing our essential humanity. Skynet, the self-aware computer of the Terminator movie series that embarks on a crusade to exterminate humanity, is just the dream of an evil genius.

J.C.R.Licklider, an American scientist in the 1960s had a different dream. He was one of the pioneers in the creation of the Internet, once writing of the “ ‘man-machine’ symbiosis ” as his vision for the way humans and computers would work together. The Internet, especially in the form of the mobile connected devices which many use intimately every day, is enabling this symbiosis to occur. This dream, unlike the endless (and ultimately fruitless) quest for artificial intelligence, recognises the weaknesses and failings in both computers and humans rather than triumphantly desiring computers to be like humans or vice versa. Only through symbiosis does each compensate for the other.

But humans must also realise that they are not solely in charge of their destinies. Connectedness is becoming a pervasive fact of life. As it does so, humans form a permanent connection with the technologies of networking: they become our partners, not servants. Our future is now shaped by the interaction between our lives and the computers and networks that make them work. In effect, each connected human becomes a part of the network: we give up ideals of freedoms and are no longer autonomous individuals.

Our capacity to express our individual identity – through Facebook walls, Twitter updates, Flickr photo galleries, Youtube home videos – has never been stronger. But the basis of that individuality has never been weaker. We are as much data and code as the websites we visit, and the applications we use.

Ultimately, connectedness is the new future of humans and technology. Connectedness not only binds humans together more strongly, but binds us to our technology. It enriches us, but it also fragments our lives into diffuse packets and streams of data which take on lives of their own. Who we are, and how we make sense of things has changed forever.

BIO

Matthew Allen is Professor of Internet Studies, Curtin University. He has been analysing the social consequences of the Internet for 15 years and established the first department at an Australian university dedicated to research and education in this field. He can be found at netcrit.net (link resides outside of ibm.com) and followed at ®netcrit.

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