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21st
April
2006
PM canes ‘rubbish’ postmodern teaching | News | The Australian
Just on my way home from work, but thought I’d make note on this interesting news piece with John Howard weighing in to some of the current debates on the “dumbing down” of education. I’m not fully up-to-speed on the issues involved but broadly from what I’ve heard this whole “Outcomes Based” education system is a major worry. Current pieces of pop-culture such as comic books, popular movies, music videos etc are studied along with (or more worringly, in place of) classic literature, questions in a physics exam ask students about the “ethics” of the problem and don’t test their actual understanding or ability in physics or maths. It’s a few years now since I was in high school but even then I thought our literature course had too much modern authors like Bruce Dawe and Randolph Stowe, and not enough classics (we did study a bit of Sophocles and Shakespeare but that was about it). I don’t know if Howard is right in claiming that this educational approach is a negative effect of more general post-modern thought – he may well be, but either way it’s a serious concern. It’ll never happen but I still think returning to a more “classical education” including classical history, literature, languages, philosophy etc like they had in the old days wouldn’t be a bad thing. I sure wish I was better educated in these things.
Categories : News, Personal, Philosophy |
21st
April
2006
Two things about me – One is that I hate being disorganized, two is that I’m rather prone to disorganization (at least I feel like I am). I am convinced that disorganization wastes time and productivity and ultimate breeds lethargy and laziness. There’s a challenging discussion currently going on over at lowercase about some characteristics of successful business leaders and to what extent we can/should apply these ideas to Christian life, specifically church leadership. If nothing else this has inspired me that I should be making better use of the time that I have, aiming to honour God more fully in every sphere of my life. And for me, the first step in this has to be getting organized. Cleaning my desks (at work and home), emptying my filing trays, throwing out clutter, organizing my computer use better (making more efficient use of RSS amongst other things), and better discipline in using my home time effectively.
Funnily enough, as I was writing this one of the nurses was complaining to me about how messy some of the other doctor’s rooms are, and how mine was not too bad. This was very surprising to me as I thought my room was a bit of a tip. Not sure if I’m brave enough to see how bad the others’ rooms are…
Categories : Personal |
21st
April
2006
Got an email this morning saying I am approaching my monthly bandwidth limit for this webpage, which surprised me. When I signed up a little under a month ago I chose a free hosting package with a monthly transfer limit of 3 Gigabytes, which I thought would be plenty for my humble blog. It probably is, but only just – my current usage after 3 weeks is 2461.34Mb.
I’d love to look on the bright side and claim that this is because of the wild popularity of my blog, but looking a bit closer at the statistics, it seems that this isn’t the case. 793.47 MB of my transfers have been rung up by 3295 unique visitors, but then another 1.54 Gb of traffic has been generated by robots, worms, or replies with special HTTP status codes. So two thirds of my traffic is non-human. Now the other issue is that a fair proportion of my traffic is still to hits on archived pages from my old blog, which I copied onto my new host (eg Aaron Sorkin) I think perhaps I should delete these old pages now and just let the Spiders work on my new blog since all the posts have been transferred into wordpress anyway. That just might mean that links from search engines might not work for a while. Not sure what to do about that. What I am going to do though is upgrade to a slightly less free package which has 15 Gb a month transfers, which should give me ample breathing room.
Categories : Housekeeping |
