The über-efficient teacher: Harnessing technology for a student-demand driven “now”

For many years I've been incorporating Web 2.0 technologies into my teaching. This year I have found some success with my teaching model, and today I presented the model at the University of Canberra. The video-recording of the presentation is below:

Here is the description I used to advertise the event:

Michael de Percy demonstrates how he can teach 250 students with zero admin support AND zero sessional staff support. His approach will enable you to achieve learning outcomes better than ever AND have students raving about how good it is! This is not a theoretical talk-fest, Michael will show you how he does this “NOW.”

Enjoy!

Akamai State of the Internet: Canada still leads Australia (and here's why)...

The recently released Akamai State of the Internet Report shows that Canada is still leading Australia in all measures except the number of subscribers to connections of less than 256mbps. Here is a break down of the comparison from the Q2, 2011 report:

Despite the roll-out of the NBN and a policy focus on broadband, Australia still lags behind Canada. Will the NBN help Australia to "catch-up", or does there need to be a fundamental move away from the single national solution?

It is popular to believe that Australia has always been a "world-leader" in telecommunications outcomes. But not long after federation, things weren't looking too good. Here is a little snippet from Hansard in 1909. The "single national solution" wasn't working even back then:

With reference to your recent verbal inquiry as to how many new telegraph line extensions, apart from those along railways, have been provided in Queensland since the transfer of this Department to the Commonwealth... As every one is aware, Queensland has developed enormously during the past ten years... Yet every day I receive complaints of the telegraph system, and requests to try to get something done to improve the communication with Brisbane... Yet nothing has been done to cope with the increase of business, though all that would be necessary in cases like those, the poles being already in position, would be to fix more insulators, and put up new wires. Notwithstanding the public complaints, and my efforts, I cannot get the Department to move, and so desperate are my constituents becoming that some of them talk of voting against me because nothing is done for them. I ask the Postmaster-General to give us fair treatment.

Telecommunications remains a great "policy lever" for Australian governments, to be pulled in case of political emergency. Or not.

For example, the Royal Commission into Postal, Telegraph and Telephone Services (1910) found that sufficient funds to maintain the telecommunications network were withheld by the Treasurer to achieve other political aims in federal-state relations:

[T]he system of management is faulty, in that it permitted the Treasurer to assume financial control of services for whose efficiency he was not responsible.

This is more than just one historical flash-back where politics got in the way of the adoption of new technologies. And it wasn't necessarily the fault of Telecom Australia (back in 1982):

The present Government has rejected several of Telecom Australia’s attempts to enter new growth areas. These initiatives have included approaches for Telecom to be permitted to supply services such as facsimile machines, telephone answering machines, and videotex services. Telecom has also tried to obtain permission to market and supply under 50 line private automatic branch exchanges. Each of these initiatives has either been rejected by Government or not responded to...

The reasons why Telecom Australia was refused entry to the markets listed above appear to be political and ideological rather than a rational assessment of what the future requires for a viable and dynamic Australian communications enterprise.

Moreover, Single solutions take too long:

In 1998, the external territories and many remote communities on the mainland are still awaiting the delivery by satellite technology of many of the expectations of 1977 for instructional TV, telemedicine and digital data transmission.

Australians have always paid too much for these inferior services, too. And it isn't because of factors peculiar to Australia. According to the Productivity Commission (1999: xxiii):

• Australia’s residential and business telecommunications prices rank about average among the countries benchmarked.

• However, prices in the best performing countries are 20 to 40 per cent below Australian prices on a purchasing power parity basis in most major market segments.

• The results are not sensitive to changes in assumptions about usage.

• Further, the price performance gap is too great to be explained by factors outside the control of industry participants, such as technological change, input prices, taxes and geography.

• An overall assessment of the evidence points to government involvement and intervention having a major influence on prices across the countries benchmarked.

My argument is not against government ownership per se, but against monolithic control by one particular government. So long as the provision of communications services remains purely a political (rather than a commercial) issue, Australia will always be behind other developed nations. And what's more, we'll continue to pay too much.

Steve Jobs R.I.P.

Today I took delivery of an iPad 2 wifi, courtesy of the AFR Smart Investor SMILES survey. Today also happened to be the last day the founder of Apple Inc was of this earth.

Typically, using Apple devices gives me a little taste of what it's like for my parents when they use Facebook, but the iPad is proving to be very intuitive.

I've been a big fan of desktops but the iPad is definitely changing the way we connect on the go. It's little wonder that now more Australians use mobile connections than DSL with such lightweight devices.

The popularity of iPads and iPhones is such that the next iteration of my e-textbook will be in VitalSource as the company's iApp is proving very popular with my students. So popular, in fact, that the success of the earlier version was limited by its accessibility via an iApp.

Jobs' enthusiasm for an interconnected world will be sorely missed, as will his presence in an industry that has been dominated by only two uber-geeks for most of my lifetime. But as Henry Ford was the mass producer who set the tone of the 20th century, Jobs and Gates have certainly set the scene for the information revolution that still, after all these years, seems just that little bit around the corner.

For Jobs, not being here to witness the fruits of his foresight in its full glory is one of the all-too-common tragic consequences for many of history's great visionaries.

Government tries to solve NBN puzzle with more government

Who knew back in 1901 that by giving the Commonwealth the power to deal with “Postal, telegraphic, telephonic, and other like services”, we’d be in this mess 110 years later?

In October last year, NBN Co and government officials briefed Gungahlin residents on the local NBN rollout, but they had very little to say. Most people wanted to know the big things: Who will get access to it? Where will it be deployed? When will this happen? How much will it cost? Instead, NBN Co rattled on about sharing the future via the NBN, to think of the possibilities, and not dwell on the facts.

Approaching a year later, and with NBN’s Gungahlin rollout imminent, the big questions still haven’t been answered by NBN Co or the federal government. The release of the House of Representatives standing committee on infrastructure and communications report yesterday had this to say about the communications problem:

To date, much of Australia’s public debate around the NBN has focussed on relatively narrow issues such as pricing structures, technology options and governance issues. During the inquiry, the Committee perceived a growing appetite for a broader public discourse around what benefits the NBN could enable across Australia’s economy and society (Chapter 10, p, 245).

Rather than fix the problem, the “Labor-dominated” committee has found, after fluffing off any arguments which challenge the very design of the NBN governance model, that the solution is to talk more about the benefits of the NBN.

Citizens still want to know the big questions about NBN: Who will get access to it? Where will it be deployed? When will this happen? How much will it cost? None of these questions have been answered. Citizens are still treated with contempt and asked to “imagine the possibilities”.

Australia’s communications industries have always suffered from politics. Since the early days, we’ve been told how fabulous our communications infrastructure is when clearly we haven’t stacked up well against other advanced economies.

The only way to fix the NBN’s woes is to get the industry out of the hands of politicians and let it deal with market demand – it really is that easy.

The litmus test to check when the politicians are further enough away from the industry is just as easy: when a telecoms company CFO resigns, the event won’t even raise Malcolm Turnbull's eyebrow. In the meantime, government is the problem, not the solution.


Photograph: Copyright © 2007 Michael de Percy, taken in Canberra, 16 April 2007
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Australia still lags Canada: State of the Internet

Despite intense political interest in the state of Australia's broadband infrastructure, four years on since the Rudd Government won the 2007 federal election (with broadband featuring heavy in the ALP's policy platform), not much has changed: Canada is still leading Australia in broadband access and speed.

Average Connection Speed

Canada has a decentralised telecommunications market, dominated by regional monopolies. However, there is significant competition between platforms, particularly ADSL (traditional telecommunications carriers) and HFC (cable television providers). A major difference is that the regulatory system enables greater access to  address anti-competitive practices, especially for smaller competitors.

Average Peak Connection Speed

Meanwhile, politicians insist on making imprecise comparisons between Australia and New Zealand, as Malcolm Turnbull did at his recent National Press Club address. The latest Akamai State of the Internet figures demonstrate that  comparing Australia with New Zealand is hardly inspiring:

Broadband speeds in Australia versus New Zealand

As two of the most similar countries in the world, Canada and Australia provide a unique comparative study for political scientists, enabling the adoption of Mill's method of difference to find the underlying cause of different outcomes. A key difference is the extent of decentralisation in Canada's communications industries.

High Speed Broadband Adoption

According to the latest Akamai State of the Internet report, Canada beats Australia on all measures of broadband adoption.

Broadband Adoption >2mbps

To prove the point, the only measure where Australia beats Canada is in the adoption of "Narrowband" - connections with speeds of less than 256kbps - which is hardly an enviable position. Enabling competition by freeing up the market from federal control is the only solution. When the NBN is completed in 2020, this will remain a short-term fix.

Narrowband Adoption

Mark my words: the underlying problem of political control of Australia's communications infrastructure will be back to haunt us at the next evolution. Indeed, it has happened repeatedly throughout the history of Australian telecommunications policy. The following is from the report of the Royal Commission into Postal, Telegraph and Telephone services of 1910:

The result of unduly curtailing expenditure was pointed out repeatedly by the Department, and the required provision was made on the Estimates, but was reduced by the Treasurer. The longer the reconstruction is deferred and the longer installation of a new system is postponed the more expensive the work becomes, on account of extensions made to the old system. Construction methods were found to be practically the same as in 1901, as the Department claimed it had been impossible to improve these methods since that date, although the adoption of improved methods would obviously have tended towards economy.

100 years on and communications infrastructure is still used as a "policy lever" to be pulled every time politicians need a boost in the polls. The trouble with the NBN, despite the obvious advantages in the mid-term, is that the new and improved policy lever is an investment of such staggering proportions that it will be difficult to pry it from the hands of those who wish to continue to play politics with this important infrastructure.

                                                                                                                       

Book Notes: "Europe in the Central Middle Ages, 962-1154" by Christopher Nugent Lawrence Brooke

Europe in the Central Middle Ages, 962-1154 by Christopher Nugent Lawrence Brooke

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was a hard read, but well worth the effort. I'd be particularly interested to see if there were major differences in style between the 1964 edition (the edition I read) and later re-writes. It was helpful to be reading the story of Saladin at the same time, at least to learn about the later parts of the period from a variety of perspectives. It would be useful for non-Europeans to have an atlas at hand, especially to identify the historical areas outlined. I'd recommend having a general understanding of the period before reading the book; otherwise, much of the detail will be lost on the novice reader. As for the book itself, it lost its coherent thread once the period of the crusades was entered: I am still not sure why the period selected focused so heavily on religious practice, as this was clearly not representative of the title. Nonetheless, well worth the effort to really round-out my understanding of the period, especially the detailed bibliographical notes provided at the beginning of each chapter. Not for the faint-hearted, but I really enjoy finding random old books, reading them, and then discovering they are classic in their field.



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NBN: The paths we didn’t take & why

This article appeared as "The NBN’s the culmination of 150 years of cock ups" on The Punch, 19 May 2011: http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/the-nbns-the-culmination-of-150-years-of-cock-ups/

Wednesday’s announcement that the NBN finally made it to the mainland was good news for the many Australians who have deplorable access to broadband services. But why did it take so long?

Simple: Australia’s communications policy-makers are bounded by a centrally-controlled, single-solution approach that has been around since the time of the telegraph. This model leaves no room for innovation, encourages contractors to artificially inflate prices, and stalls whenever a skeleton can be found in the closet of the head honcho of NBN Co.

When the Canadian Samuel McGowan brought the telegraph to Victoria in 1853, his plan to become a telegraph entrepreneur was thwarted by the Victorian government’s decision to rollout the telegraph network as a public monopoly.

Not long after, James McGeorge ignored the South Australian government’s declaration that only the government could own and operate telegraph networks. McGeorge had captured the market, causing ‘the immediate revenue’ from the government’s duplicate network to be ‘infinitesimal’. McGeorge’s reward for being innovative was to have his network forcibly purchased by the South Australian Government and subsequently dismantled to prevent further competition.

Fast-forward a century and a half later, and not much has changed. Backed by its constitutional mandate for communications policy, the federal government has opted to address Australia’s broadband woes by deploying another monopoly. Just like the telephone, radio and television technologies with which, despite popular sentiment, Australia was also a developed-world laggard, it has always been the same: Do nothing for years and then try to ‘catch-up’ using public money when the problem becomes obvious.

Recent events have revealed the downside to the centrally-controlled, single-solution approach. Instead of rolling out high-speed broadband to Australian citizens, NBN Co has been embroiled in a series of scandals such as contractors charging over-inflated prices and NBN head honcho Mike Quigley caught up in a drama that really has nothing to do with NBN Co. In the meantime, the announcement that the NBN has finally reached the mainland via Armidale is only good news for the handful of people signing up to trials via the NBN.

If a decentralised approach had been adopted, none of these dramas would have been so newsworthy as to take the focus away from the real issue: giving Australians access to broadband worthy of their status as some of the richest people in the world. This begs the question: Why is broadband so bad here?

It is easy to blame Telstra, and many do. But Telstra didn’t create itself, it was created by the federal government. The blame should go where it is due. But is it enough to engage in short-term blame-storming to find the answer? Enter serendipity.

McGowan brought the telegraph to Australia from Canada and he also brought a copy of the legislation that enabled the telegraph to be deployed. But he wasn’t able to bring the decentralised policy approach that has enabled Canadians to be at the forefront of broadband technologies and the associated services years ahead of their Australian counterparts.

Solving Australia’s broadband problems requires a longer-term view which is hard to fathom through a short-term lens – what worked in the past doesn’t work now. But our institutions aren’t capable of letting go of communications policy as a lever for political goals, even though these goals are no longer congruent with the brave policy agenda that opened Australia’s protected economy to global competition some 30-odd years ago.

Australian policy-makers on both sides of politics must let go of the social-democratic past and forget about trying to provide the same level of service to everybody. Given the snail-like pace of the NBN’s deployment, by the time everyone gets access to high-speed broadband it will be time for another government-controlled monopoly to rollout the next communications innovation.

It is now common knowledge that when governments intervene in markets, they invariably create false market conditions which often end badly – the roof insulation scheme is an obvious recent example. Focusing on competition through a variety of approaches to the deployment of broadband technologies through a variety of government and industry players would have avoided the problems facing NBN Co right now.

Regardless, with a century and a half of policy-making experience focused on centrally-controlled, single-solution approaches to deploying communications technologies, Australia will be hard-pressed to adapt to the inherent complexity of the information revolution that is happening whether Australians have access to high-speed broadband or not.