Broadbanding the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan

Tomorrow I present my early findings from research conducted in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The presentation will be delivered at the Australian and New Zealand School of Government's Institute for Governance seminar series at the University of Canberra.

Considering Jordan's GDP per capita is about 13 times less than Australia's, broadband services are very good. I was able to access a variety of Wimax and ADSL services from Amman, Aqaba and Irbid and could easily purchase additional gigabytes of download access as required. Compared to Palmerston in the ACT, Jordan's broadband performance was outstanding.

I am interested in the development of institutions. Jordan's relatively new institutions and their recent development provided me with a unique and less ethno-centric view of the policy world. I am particularly grateful to the Princess Sumaya University for Technology for their support during my time in Jordan and also Aqaba Adventure Divers who provided me with much needed accommodation during the Eid Al-Adha period.

Below is a copy of the presentation. More will be forthcoming in the new year as I look at the institutions in the communications industries of Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Broadbanding the nation: Jordan

View more presentations from Michael de Percy.

Photograph: Copyright © 2009 Michael de Percy, taken in Jordan, 20 November 2009

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.