The "My Lecturer" Website: Students trump government

A while back Julia Gillard suggested the ...My University“ website would force boring university lecturers to lift their game. But it seems that the government has missed the boat to stir up these old bores. And a group of students has taken the initiative to stir up the insomnia-curers on their own terms.

This initiative, the My Lecturer website: http://mylecturer.net.au/, brings to Australia an idea that started in the US with websites such as Rate My Professor. Admirably, the Australian site is cautious about defamation and actively encourages students to be constructive in their feedback. But is it a good thing or a bad thing for Australian higher education?

For proponents of open academia, a growing movement which believes all educational materials and information should be publicly available; it might be a good thing. But for traditionalists, it might just be the scariest thing in the world!

Open academia includes initiatives such as Wikiversity, a site dedicated to enabling academics to put their course materials in the public realm, are growing in popularity. Such initiatives threaten to disrupt higher education industries such as textbook publishers and even research journals as a growing number of academics move their materials into the public realm. This is significant as entire industries worldwide are at stake, but so is the future of higher education.

Open education asks the question of existing education institutions: Who is education for? From a purely liberal perspective, open education provides everyone with equality of opportunity – if the materials are freely available, we all have the opportunity to receive an education. We might have to pay for the qualification, but at least the education is free.

But many traditionalists see this 'power to the people' approach as little short of a 'dumbing down' of the best of our educational institutions. Indeed, a colleague recently recalled to me a documentary from years ago where an old British professor suggested that ...bad teaching is a tradition. How else would we get our students to learn for themselves?“ Certainly some food for thought there!

But what of the My Lecturer site? And just how 'open' should open education be?

The furore over the 'My School' website saw unintended consequences such as teachers helping students to cheat 'no doubt so that either the teachers' careers were not jeopardised or that the students' education wasn't seen in a bad light. Or more likely both. But government should have seen this coming from a mile off. Everybody knows that Ivy League tables are anti-egalitarian – or dare I say it – they are just plain unAustralian.

What makes the My Lecturer site different is that it is not something imposed by government, but it is an initiative from the students themselves. As one who encourages students to take the initiative and stake a claim in their own future, it is very difficult to see the My Lecturer site as anything but positive.

Traditionalists might be opposed, but these same people are more likely to be those who have some hidden interest to protect. The big test will be whether the open academia crew accept this type of openness, or if they are only in favour of openness which they themselves create

The times are a-changing for the higher education sector, but the same is true for most sectors of the economy. Indeed, access to technology is fulfilling what Manuel Castells (among others) predicted well before today's capabilities were a practical reality. But where does it all end?

From the very early findings of my research into the use of openness via technology in organisations to date, openness results in higher quality, increased productivity, better recognition of high-performing individuals, and overall improved organisational performance. It is simply more difficult for poor performance to go unchecked in an open organisational culture.

But does this justify the PM targeting 'boring lecturers' with the My University website? It is a bit rich when the leader of a political party that can barely form government makes an assumption about the performance of individual lecturers in a sector she hasn't experienced for many years.

But John Howard held a similar view a few years ago and provided funding to universities on the basis of workplace relations reforms, including the introduction of individual performance management techniques as a condition of funding.

Strangely enough, some of us lowly lecturers have already been putting our teaching feedback from these publicly-funded ...performance initiatives“ into the public realm on our blogs or even Wikiversity. The original intention by government may have been to intimidate, but with the majority of lecturers focused on providing the best possible skills and intellectual development for our students, and many of us seeing the benefits of openness, it should be no surprise that government misunderstands the higher education sector.

But now that the My Lecturer website has emerged from out of nowhere to trump bad lecturers, reward good lecturers, and provide future students with feedback which is not tainted by a self-interested government, it is my hope that the government's My University website is passé. For that, the team of students who put the My Lecturer website together are to be applauded and I trust that the new model will break down the old hierarchy of higher education.

Openness is, after all, in all of our best interests.

Public ownership of the NBN is just crazy talk

© Depositphotos.com/@olly18

There is some speculation the Greens will de-rail the privatisation of the NBN in a few years time, based on a pledge made by senator Scott Ludlam "to fight for the project to remain in public hands". At a time when the NBN is the only real reason Labor is in power, this is just crazy talk.

The premise that the NBN will result in a monopoly holder is not a done deal. If anything, there are plenty of lessons to be learnt from the privatisation of Telstra. And the idea that Telstra's privatisation left Australia with a monopoly provider as a direct result of privatisation is simply wrong - the Howard government made a mess of this on the basis of blind ideology. Ludlam's pledge is another case of blind ideology making decisions, albeit in the other ideological direction.

But is privatisation necessarily bad?

It can be, but usually it is the government who messes it up. Businesses want to make a profit? Surprise, surprise, but this isn't necessarily evil. A quick glance at most attempts at full privatisation or public-private partnerships (PPPs) demonstrates that it is rarely businesses who are the bad guys. After all, state governments refused to release details on the Harbour Tunnel and other PPPs, not the businesses who were calling for this to be done all along.

But what about Telstra? With Telstra's share price taking a caning in the market, more meddling by government with the NBN should be over and done with as quickly as possible. Ongoing public ownership is not a solution, it is the problem that got us here in the first place. And handing over Telstra's ageing assets to NBN Co. is the best way to fix what should have been done before the decision to privatise Telstra was made on the basis of ideology and not practical reality.

Once communications networks are in private hands and there is real competition, there is no evidence anywhere in the world to suggest that market-based approaches don't work. The single national solution provided by the NBN is just one approach to fix the mess created by governments since 1975 when the monolithic Postmaster General's Department (PMG) was finally divided and conquered. But T3 released the untamed gorilla that perpetuated the policy failures of every government since PMG's demise. It is very important to note that none of this was really the private sector's doing.

And there is little doubt that government meddling in the market distorts everything from prices, to competition, to regulation, to share prices - even the information available for consumers to make decisions which don't end up in tears.

From personal experience, I am paying $110 per month for a highspeed, 10gb Wimax plan because nothing else is fast enough in Palmerston via Gungahlin. That's expensive. But with the NBN due to be deployed in my suburb some time in the future, I am not very happy about government using my tax money to give me high-speed broadband while I am already committed to a two-year contract out of the necessity created by government meddling in the first place.

If the NBN improves the service I currently receive I will be happy, but if it means I have to pay out a two-year contract to move to the NBN I have also paid for, I will be quite grumpy indeed!

So let us applaud the NBN for how it will fix the broadband woes created by governments past. But don't  think ongoing public ownership of the NBN is a good thing.

The Greens really need to reconsider their approach to public ownership, especially where communications networks are concerned. If they want to keep the duct structure in public hands to ensure access for all competitors, then that is another thing. And this could be built out as part of road or other network budgets but that would require greater cooperation within our federal system. But for the federal government to own it all is nothing short of a return to the bad old days.

Australia really needs to get over its addiction to government ownership and start applauding the successes of our private sector. If we don't, we risk hampering our future success. Can you remember a single occasion where our private sector was applauded for major feats of engineering? Not once!

Yet history has proven time and again that ideological approaches devoid of lived experience are doomed to fail. So any policy decision based solely on ideology, whether left or right, should be avoided at all costs. And we are already too far behind the rest of the world in taking advantage of the information revolution for government to meddle further with our communications industries.

Put simply, committing to public ownership for the sake of public ownership is a backward step that nobody should be seriously considering at this stage of the NBN's deployment. It is just crazy talk.

Decentralised NBN Key to Unlocking the Potential of Our Regions

Photo taken on Black Mountain, Canberra by Michael de Percy - CC: BY-NC-SA

“Rolling in” the NBN from the bush to the city is good news for regional areas. Indeed, the trickle-down-effect has never really worked for “the bush” so the reversal of the NBN’s delivery approach is a promising sign of policy change.

With Australia’s coastal cities reaching crises in housing affordability, traffic congestion, over-population and a rapidly diminishing quality of life, the NBN “roll-in” provides a timely opportunity to reinvigorate our neglected regional areas. But is the “roll-in” just centralisation going backwards or an opportunity for decentralisation and therefore our regions to – dare I say it – move forward?

In comparison to other geographically large, wealthy, federal nations, Australia is one of the most highly centralised in terms of both governance and population concentration. For decades now, Australian policy makers have been focusing on the ways things are, rather than how they could be, and the regions have been paying the price with diminishing services leading to a vicious cycle of economic stagnation and ever-decreasing populations.

To make matters worse, whenever service delivery fails, the trend in policy responses has been to centralise responsibility with the federal government, whether it is healthcare, education, workplace relations or indeed telecommunications. Clearly, centralisation has not worked for our regions.

And centralisation has its cost. Centralisation tends to lead to systemic policy failures due to the overwhelmingly bureaucratic decision-making processes needed to ensure the monolith operates in a rational manner. This typically means that programs designed to deliver services wheel-spin in administrative expenditure for years before ever getting any rubber on the road. The Coalition’s Metropolitan Broadband Connect program was a good example where millions in administrative costs led to minimal outcomes in terms of improving services to citizens two years later. Put simply, centralisation does not make good economic sense.

Administrative expenses aside, there is also a human capital cost to centralisation which political parties are able to avoid right up until it is too obvious to ignore – often when major opportunities have already been lost. The trouble with human capital, particularly skills development, is that it is only noticeable when it is absent. For example, as more and more policy functions are centralised, Australian citizens have less and less access to policy processes. As citizens have less access to the policy process, they have less interest in participating.

A simple example of poor policy participation was the Regional Telecommunications Independent Review Committee consultation I attended in Sydney a few years ago. It’s a no-brainer to guess how many regional citizens were able to attend a consultation on regional issues held in Sydney. Focus groups don’t overcome the problem either, and the recent election outcome is clear evidence that focus groups simply don’t work for successful policy formulation.

Further, with centralisation, policy actors become increasingly organised and specialised, leaving less room for the ordinary citizen to be involved. This is already a problem for local political representation, where the federal government’s constitutional responsibility for telecommunications means that only federal representatives have any real impact on policy.

NBN Co, when it was first established, started looking for a “headquarters”. But whenever there is a choice to be made between “Sydney or the Bush”, the original intent of the old Aussie saying holds true – nobody really wants to be in the bush unless they’re reminiscing over a Paterson or Lawson classic.

In the end, citizens lose faith in their political representatives and become disenfranchised. Any hope of harnessing the nation’s human capital is then lost and bureaucrats are left to struggle away, delivering one project at a time to “customers” who probably would have chosen a different “supplier” if they had a choice. In essence, central systems are too slow and can only deliver one solution to a myriad of problems. Governments are generally bad at this as the Coalition rightly suggested, but their model – “NBN 3.0” - was stuck in centralisation-mode, too.

It seems that the only way the bush was ever going to get a broadband Guernsey was via the independents. There is simply no way a “roll-in” of the NBN would have happened if the Gillard Government could govern in its own right. But must it be centrally delivered?

The NBN “roll-in” provides an opportunity for economic stimulus and to develop human capital in the regions. A decentralised “roll-in”, harnessing the skills, knowledge and political clout of all sectors of the community (including local government) to address the modern communications needs of our regions will enable multiple “roll-ins” and ultimately faster deployment of the NBN. Granted, decentralisation can lead to sporadic failure in some instances, but it will certainly alleviate the current eight year wait for Australians to officially join the information revolution.

A quick look at Canada and the United States shows that regional development and decentralisation tend to go hand-in-hand. Neither country has a single national solution for broadband, yet both outperform Australia in both regional prosperity and connectivity.

Right now is the time for a new approach to regional development and service delivery, and only the federal government has the jurisdiction to make it happen. If we know anything so far, it is that the centralised model just doesn’t work.

Decentralisation is the key to unlocking the potential of our regions while making life in both “Sydney and the Bush” just that little more bearable.

NBN 3.0? Lessons from an Arabian Broadband Experience

Broadbanding the Nation: The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (Photo by Michael de Percy CC: BY-NC-SA)

From Photo Gallery

Is NBN 3.0 a feasible alternative?

Regardless of the politicking behind broadband policy, there has been little discussion about what is needed and why we need it in terms of broadband outcomes. Labor's NBN promises vast coverage of fibre-optic cable (effectively replacing the copper network currently owned by Telstra) and very high speed broadband (100 mbps) with a handful of hard-to-reach places served by satellite and wireless. The Coalition is promising to do what they did for more than a decade which got us into our broadband woes in the first place. But now there appears to be a third option: NBN 3.0.

Rather than repeat what has already been written, details on the Alliance for Affordable Broadband's NBN 3.0 provided by independent technology journalist Renai Lemay are available here.

There has been some speculation about using wireless technologies in lieu of a fibre-optic NBN. Here I draw on some experiences in a country with mostly Wimax services to argue that these technologies can provide an adequate user experience for household users.

An Arabian Wimax Experience

The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is a small, non-oil producing, mostly land-locked country in the Middle East, bordering Israel in the west, Iraq and Saudi Arabia in the east, and Syria in the north. With a population of some 6 million people, Jordan is home to many ancient wonders and sites of significant historical and religious importance.

Comparing Australia to Jordan is inherently unfair: Australia's GDP per capita is some 13 times more than that of Jordan. But when it comes to access to broadband, my personal experience is that Jordanians - if they can afford it - have access to better services.

In Palmerston via Gungahlin, in full view of the flag atop Parliament House, it really doesn't matter how much money you have. Out of frustration with ADSL, I now have a Wimax connection (and a two-year contract) which at least gives me adequate speeds during peak times but it costs $110 per month. The trouble is I am limited to 10GB of downloads per month - regardless of how much I am willing to pay for additional data.

While in Jordan, I experienced an ADSL connection in Amman, the captial, which worked fine (once we upgraded the ageing modem). Just about every Western cafe and fast food joint had free wifi for customers - again no problems. In the south, I experienced blistering Wimax speeds while staying at a dive centre, and a similar service closer to the centre of Aqaba, Jordan's only port city on the Red Sea.

The dive centre's download limit was regularly blasted by a few guests who insisted on watching videos online. This created a bit of havoc when I tried to help out the crew with some web page changes and a workshop on using Facebook to market the business. But it was a simple phone call to the supplier and 1 Jordanian dinar (about AUD $2) per gigabyte of additional download - and that was it. Try doing that with your typical Aussie plan!

Implications for NBN 3.0

So what does this quick comparison mean for NBN 3.0?

First, it means that Australia's broadband services are poorer than those provided in less well-off developing nations.

Second, it means that Wimax technologies can deliver adequate broadband experiences to the typical household user.

Third, it means that there may be some merit to NBN 3.0.

But is wireless good enough?

Let me put it this way - if I was being operated on by a surgeon receiving instructions from a specialist via a Wimax connection, I'd be pretty worried. Satellite would be even scarier. And if I was in the middle of an online university test using my connection here in Palmerston via Gungahlin, I'd be quite worried about the connection dropping out (as it does regularly) and my complaints about my Net connection would get the "my dog ate my paper" treatment. Or worse, my light-weight download limit would be blasted by 2 weeks worth of online learning and then I would be stuck until the next month. Students in the UK simply don't have this problem because capped plans are the exception not the rule.

So while there is some merit in the less-fibre NBN 3.0 option, I think it will be a missed opportunity for Australia if we don't get the NBN promised by Labor. Having said that, I would rather have a Jordanian broadband experience than a Palmerston via Gungahlin fraudband experience any day, so NBN 3.0 sounds better than what we have now.