The best of Life & Stuff

30/12/2013 by
ship-song-project

30 December 2013 Life & Stuff is our lifestyle section: art, music, musings, celebrations and anniversaries, silliness, wisdom.   This is our selection from the past two years. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ 26 November 2013 In the popular recent ABC TV series Redesign Your Brain , advertising executive and now TV personality Todd Sampson “trained his brain” to enable him to undertake new (for him) and demanding mental challenges, such as memorising the sequence of a shuffled pack of cards and doing a Houdini type of escape trick. Demonstrating what the experts call "brain plasticity", Sampson shows that … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Life & stuff, Uncategorized Tagged With:

Things to do

30/12/2013 by
Paul Kelly

iTunes U If you’ve got an Apple device - iPad, iPhone or iPod - you can improve your mind while you're relaxing on the beach - cue up ancient Roman history or physics podcasts on La Trobe University’s iTunesU. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Summer School for Gardeners  Open Gardens Australia and the University of Melbourne are conducting the  inaugural Summer School for Gardeners - Keeping Gardening Down to Earth at Melbourne's Burnley campus 22-24 January 2014.  The three-day seminar and workshop program will provide opportunities to learn about the latest gardening … [Read more...]

Filed Under: La Trobe University, Life & stuff, University of Melbourne Tagged With:

The year in cartoons

30/12/2013 by
spooner-cross-23-mar-600x400

30 December 2013 So much insightful, funny and cutting commentary comes from Australia's great cartoonists. Many people miss out. Inspired by Barrie Cassidy's Insiders Talking Pictures, this Facebook page - Political Cartoons Australia  - has a selection of the year's best cartoons.  Our personal favourite by Fairfax's John Spooner accompanied the post The tide goes out, on the crumbling of the Gillard Government. … [Read more...]

Filed Under: ALP, Life & stuff Tagged With:

$5 ‘GP fee’ – a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist

30/12/2013 by
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30 December 2013 The government has refused to rule out a proposal to make patients pay a $5 fee for bulk-billed GP visits. But it solves a problem that nobody can show exists, writes Mark Fletcher. Tinkering with policies because you want to save cash is nearly always considered a terrible idea.  In Policy Heaven, policy experts sit down, work out what we want to achieve, work out what that will cost, and then raise the revenue.  In theory, we should be able to work out what the policy priorities of a Government are through how it distributes funds.  After all, there’s a reason why schools have fundraisers for infrastructure, but the military doesn’t. Politics, being what … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Budget, Coalition policies, Government, Uncategorized Tagged With: ,

Cricket on the radio

30/12/2013 by

The sounds of summer One of the sounds of an Australian summer is the cricket on the radio.  And the sound is about to change with the imminent retirement of ABC commentator Kerry "Skull" O'Keefe.  As Tim Lane describes it, the one-time peroxide-haired leggie, with an action more complicated than the deliveries it produced, grew from relative obscurity to cult figure status in the space of one or two guffaws of snorting laughter.  The laugh and his idiosyncratic form of humour annoys some people but for most of us, Skull has given an added colourful dimension to the cricket.  One of his more celebrated moments was the Frog Joke but Harsha Bhogle's Naga Chillies was also a classic radio … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Life & stuff, Uncategorized Tagged With:

What’s our vision for the future of learning?

30/12/2013 by
Future of Learning

Mindshift    |    30 December 2013 The following is an excerpt from Open: How We’ll Live, Work, and Learn in the Future written by British learning Futurist David Price. For 150 years, formal education has adopted an ‘inside-out’ mindset – schools and colleges have usually been organised around the needs of the educators, not the learners. In areas such as research, this is nothing to be embarrassed about. Ground-breaking inventions and pioneering new thinking often arise from the selfishness that informs so-called ‘blue-sky’ research. Defending such freedoms from the external drive for practical and commercial implementation has often encouraged a necessary … [Read more...]

Filed Under: MOOCs, Schools, Society Tagged With:

Are Australian apprentices ‘disappearing’?

30/12/2013 by

The Conversation    |      30 December 2013 “The previous government oversaw changes to apprenticeship policy and cuts in employer incentives that led to huge drops in the numbers of young people starting an apprenticeship.” - Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, media release, October 30. The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry has blamed the former government for a fall in the number of young people starting an apprenticeship. The decline has been labelled in The Australian as “the disappearing trainee” – a legacy of the Labor government linked to its decision to remove employer incentives. So are Australian apprentices really disappearing? Disappearing … [Read more...]

Filed Under: ACCI, VET, Vocational education & training Tagged With: ,
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