Belshaw's World - the online myth

Note to readers: This post appeared as a column in the Armidale Express on 14 September 2011. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because the Express columns are not on line. You can see all the columns by clicking here for 2009, here for 2010, here for 2011.

I spent the first six months of this year working on a new on-line service delivery project.

The project aimed to streamline certain aspects of professional practice, and especially the preparation of certain types of more complex documents.

I am not a tec head. I focused on the way the system needed to operate if it was to meet customer need, leaving specific technical solutions to others.

As part of this, I spent a fair bit of time looking at other offerings that were competitive in one way or another with what we wanted to achieve. There were some interesting offerings in the marketplace, but none really delivered an integrated solution.

We faced two key problems in our attempts to define a better approach.

The first was to properly understand just how professionals worked when carrying out the specific tasks that we were interested in. For our system to work, we had to make it easier for the professional to do their work across a whole document preparation process that might involve multiple steps spread over time, with varying interactions with clients and other professionals.

This is not as easy as it sounds. Most on-line systems expect people to adjust to them. It is far harder to adjust systems to people.

The second problem was to define the best interface between customers and our system, taking work processes into account. Again, this is not as easy as it sounds.

The interface needed to provide a seamless experience in which the customer could access information from a variety of sources, seek help as required and write and edit, all within the one interface. The system also had to be easy to use since most customers were not especially computer or internet savvy.

In the end, we had to put aspects of the project aside because the costs and technical difficulties associated with the translation of the functional requirements into a working system were too great for the available budget.

This experience is relevant to a number of discussions taking place in education, including issues associated with external teaching.

I follow a number of educators on Twitter and via blogs who are absolute enthusiasts for the use of new and especially on-line technology in teaching. I admire their enthusiasm, but cannot fully share it.

Part of my problem is just time. I am hard pressed to do what I’m doing now, let alone learn how to use the latest system. However, it’s more than that.

One of the problems that we faced in the project I talked about lay in the gap between those concerned with the business and operational requirements and the technologists and advanced users.

I am not sure which was worse. Advanced users wanted bells and whistles, while the technologists often opted for specific solutions that they liked in advance of the discussion on work processes. We see both at work in the education arena.

To my mind, the key to success in effectively utilising new on-line technology in education lies in what we call fitness for purpose, taking into account both the limitations of technology and the needs and capacities of those on both sides of the system.

One of the big myths of on-line delivery is that it’s cheaper and faster. That’s not necessarily so.

In education, content still has to be prepared. Further, preparation of that content normally takes more time because of the need to modify it to fit on-line forms. Once on-line it can be accessed by more people, but the initial input time is still greater.

In education too, a whole series of processes still have to be carried out. Assignments have to be marked, queries answered, students supported.

Some of these processes can be automated: common student queries can be answered at a single point; forums can be used as a vehicle for discussion; simple tests can be used to test basic knowledge. Still, my experience suggests that the actual time input costs involved in supporting the on-line student can be greater than the equivalent internal student.

Don’t get me wrong here. I am not saying that on-line education is a bad thing, especially for students who for reasons of time or distance cannot access full time on-campus study. However, I do think that unrealistic expectations are sometimes attached to the process.

Chatting to my daughters who are internal students at Sydney universities as well as to those studying fully on-line including UNE students, I don’t think that any of the universities have actually mastered the use of the internet.

Probably the biggest difficulty is the same one we struggled with in the project I described earlier, creating a system that links to work or study processes.

The sad story of the Dorrigo to Glenreagh Railway 2 - building the line

My first post in this series, The sad story of the Dorrigo to Glenreagh Railway 1 - ghost railway, simply set the scene,  

For those who don't know Dorrigo, it lies on the Dorrigo Plateau perched on the edge of the New England escarpment. This is truly beautiful country, although the colours are not quite your Australian stereotypical colours as so often presented. It is just too green because of the high rainfall.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Dorrigo was heavily forested. Lumbering and clearing began, but the high escarpment made it difficult to get produce to the seaboard. Timber in particular had to be hauled over rough roads to Armidale or Grafton.

This type of difficulty was was true to greater or lesser extent across New England. Fights for east-west rail links helped fuel the discontent that generated the desire of so many New Englanders over more than 150 years to gain Northern self-government.

In 1905, work finally began on a north-south North Coast line. Settlers on the Dorrigo Plateau began an intensive campaign to link their area to the projected railway. On 28 December 1910, the Glenreagh to Dorrigo Railway Act was passed, providing for the construction of a line linking Glenreagh on the coast to Dorrigo. This would allow timber and other produce to be shifted through the small port at Coffs Harbour. However, the protagonists saw this as a first step in a longer inland east-west line.  

The photo shows bullock teams at work at the Coffs Habour port in 1928.

Survey work on the new line did not commence until 1914, actual construction a little later. In 1917, the war interrupted work, with construction beginning again in 1920.

Construction was no mean feat because of the rugged terrain and regular rain. Land slips were common and were to plague the line throughout its life.

The new line was finally opened on 23 December 1924, providing a Christmas present to residents of the Dorrigo. Next step, construction of the Dorrigo-Guyra line begins.

Next post. First post

Postscript

I felt a bit sad writing this post. It's not just a story of lost dreams, but today everything is so tied up in rules, regulations, proscriptions, evaluations, impact statements, cost-benefit analyses, performance measures etc that the Government in Sydney struggles to build a single railway line. 

Further reading

For those interested in a little more:

• The colours of New England looks at the changing colours across New England and the relationship with geography
• Memories from a Glenreagh past contains a link to a video that gives a good feel for life when timber was at its peak

Belshaw's World - big issues missed in political discourse

Note to readers: This post appeared as a column in the Armidale Express on 9 September 2011. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because the Express columns are not on line. You can see all the columns by clicking here for 2009, here for 2010, here for 2011.

I don’t know about you, but I find present political discussion at Federal level quite depressing. We have what I can only describe as group think, in which everything seems to be dominated by two policy issues (refugees and the carbon tax) plus one political issue (Gillard vs Abbott).

In all the screaming media headlines and chattering heads, it’s easy to forget that life goes on, that there are other important issues that need to be dealt with, that decisions are being made that will have significant national and regional impacts.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that either refugees or the carbon tax are not important, just that the current obsession with them and the fortunes of the PM are draining the oxygen from other important issues.

From a narrow Armidale perspective, the decisions being taken on the future of higher education are far more important than either refugee policy or the carbon tax since they will determine just how many jobs the city has in five years time. That’s kind of important.

More broadly, the Gonski inquiry into school funding has just released four important research papers.

They suggest, among other things, that while Australian school education still scores quite well, the gap between the top and bottom performers has widened. They also suggest that performance within the Australian school system is far more influenced by socio-economic factors than is the case in many other places.

As I write, the Australian Government is considering changes to visa requirements to make it easier to bring in skilled labour to work on mining projects that cannot otherwise get people.

Facing its own skilled labour problems, the Defence Department has announced plans to try to train the workers it needs for planned large scale Defence procurements. The skills required no longer exist in this country.

All three examples selected deal in some way with education and training.

To take a different area, who knows what is happening with the Australian Government’s regional development agenda? Action goes on, but it has largely vanished from the political stage in terms of public discussion.

One of the features of all these various policy areas is the importance of time.

Back in another mining boom, I was a member of a high level interdepartmental committee formed to address the question of skills shortages. An investment boom was underway, and we didn’t have the people required to build the mines and railways.

Looking back, we had been under-investing in technical education. Special programs were launched to try to increase supply of skilled labour.

By the time those people started to come on stream, that mining boom was over. Further, the economic re-structuring of the 1980s took away just those jobs in manufacturing that the newly trained workers were equipped to do. With unemployed tradesmen, training was cut back again, leading to subsequent skills shortages.

In the late 1990s, I was CEO of the Royal Australian College of Ophthalmologists. Our workforce planning analysis suggested a looming shortage of ophthalmologists because of the combination of population growth with an aging population. But where were the new trainees to come from?

The then Commonwealth Minister for Health had been worried about the costs of medicare. He had concluded that there were too many GPs and that this was leading to over-servicing. Medical training was cut back, while it was made more difficult for GPs to get the required certification to access medicare. The resulting shortages at all levels of medicine are now history.

In higher education as well, policy has chopped and changed in light of current views and fashions with significant long term effects. The problems faced by UNE are partly a result of poor management, more the flow-on effects of past Government decisions that started in the 1980s.

If we now link all this back to current imbroglios at Federal level, the Gillard Government may or may not survive. We may or may not have overseas processing of refugees. We may or may not have a carbon tax.

What we can be sure of is that the current focus on the short term, the obsession with the Government’s immediate fortunes, Mr Abbott’s hard ball short term political focus, means that the scope for real policy discussion has become increasingly constrained.

Those of us with a genuine interest in resolving past problems, with finding a way to actually do things better, have become increasingly marginalised. Real policy discussion has moved from the centre to the periphery.

You won’t find real policy discussion or indeed reporting in the main stream media with its narrow obsession with the current. You won’t find real policy discussion in the headline political discourse. It’s all been poisoned by the short term.

I think that’s a problem.

Problems with disorganisation

I am sorry for the slow posting here. It's partly a matter of personal disorganisation, partly due to the reasons I explained in a post on my personal blog, Enjoying the Rugby World Cup. I do love my Rugby!

I am flying to New Zealand Thursday for a couple of days. Despite that, I expect to resume posting tomorrow. I have a number of part completed stories: I just have to complete some for future posting!

Belshaw’s World – separatist fire smoulders 96 years on

Note to readers: This post appeared as a column in the Armidale Express on 31 August 2011. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because the Express columns are not on line. You can see all the columns by clicking here for 2009, here for 2010, here for 2011.

In 1915, an incident occurred in Grafton that would change the direction of New England history contributing, among other things, to the creation of the University of New England.

While there were regular separatist outbreaks in Northern New South Wales during the nineteenth century, they did not result in a sustained campaign for local self-government such as that maintained in North Queensland during the same period. However, by the end of the century a tradition of separatist agitation as a way of responding to local grievances had been well established.

The sense of country grievance was particularly strong in the Grafton area, a key centre for nineteenth century new state agitation.

The construction of the north-south inland railway had first damaged and then destroyed the traffic from the Tablelands and Slopes to the Grafton port. Attempts to gain a railway line from the Slopes and Tablelands to Grafton to help revive the trade had failed repeatedly. Grafton's sense of grievance associated with the destruction of its trade and the failure to gain an east-west rail link, was aggravated by the failure of attempts to gain a north-south coastal rail link, and by the failure of the Government over many years to take any action to remove the reef at the mouth of the Clarence, a reef that significantly hindered shipping.

The accumulating grievances came to a head early in 1915. The Minister of Public Works in the Holman Government, Arthur Griffith, decided to remove the free steam ferry Helen from the Grafton-South Grafton run. In the absence of any bridge, the Helen was the main means of transport between Grafton and South Grafton. There was an indignant public reaction culminating in a public meeting in the Grafton Town Hall attended by about 250 people from both municipalities.

Although the meeting had been called to discuss the Helen incident, it changed character when Earle Page moved a motion suggesting that the time had now come for the North to consider separation, either alone or in connection with the southern portion of Queensland, and calling for the appointment of a committee to investigate the question and confer with other portions of the North Coast, Tablelands and Queensland.

Page was then thirty-four. Born at Grafton, he had been educated first in the Clarence and then at Sydney High School before studying medicine at Sydney University. After a little over a year as house surgeon at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney, Page returned to the Clarence and quickly established a thriving practice together with a modern private hospital at South Grafton.

Page's travels across his practice - it covered an area of some 16,000 square kilometres - gave him a detailed knowledge of the Northern Rivers district, of its potential and problems. By 1913, when he was elected to the South Grafton Municipal Council, he was well-known in his own area. Now, with the Helen incident, began a chain of events that was to throw Page into national prominence and help give particular form to Northern history.

Page's separatist motion was carried unanimously. The committee then formed reported in April 1915. Its report, subsequently published as a pamphlet, detailed many of the arguments that were already and were to remain traditional in separatist propaganda.

The central complaint was that the North was suffering because of the centralising policies of the Sydney Government; these had retarded the progress of the state in order that the artificial progress of Sydney might be maintained. Separation was the only way to halt this process. The report then went on to recommend that the new state should include the North Coast as far south as the Hastings Range south of Kempsey, the Northern Tablelands, the Liverpool Plains and Western Slopes, and a strip of the Western Plains as far west as Bourke.

On 29 April 1915, the report was discussed at a large public meeting in Grafton which decided unanimously in favour of separation and then formed a Northern New South Wales Separation League.

The new League, with Earle Page and F. McGuren from Grafton and David Ritchie from Dorrigo as its chief propagandists, spread rapidly: by August there were twenty-two branches on the coast and an attempt was being made to extend the organisation inland. Then towards the end of 1915, the new movement vanished as fast as it had risen because of the growing impact of the war which took away its leaders, including Page himself.

This had been a grass fire, but it laid the basis for a much bigger blaze that was to burn strongly across most of the first seven decades of the twentieth century, with spot fires continuing today.

Without that blaze, we would not have the University of New England.

The sad story of the Dorrigo to Glenreagh Railway 1 - ghost railway

In the next few posts I want to say a little about the sad and sorry story of the Dorrigo to Glenreagh railway line. This is a case where a New England Government could have and probably would have taken a more pro-active approach simply because the line would have been more important, not just a minor line in a distant part of New South Wales.

To introduce the posts, this you tube video is simply called Ghost Railway:

 

New England and the NSW Budget 2011

I have been dredging my way through the NSW budget papers trying to make an assessment of the likely impact on New England. Those who are interested can find the budget papers link here.

It's remarkably difficult to do, in part because New England doesn't exist in a formal sense so data isn't organised in that way, in part because so much depends upon the detail of individual agency plans. The one thing that we can be reasonably certain of is that the great majority of the extra billion in mining royalties will come from New England and especially the Hunter.

While digging around, I found that the new Government has released its own state plan to replace the previous Labor Government plan. 

I will try to do at least some form of rough assessment of both from a New England perspective over the next day or so. As I have argued before, unless we have some idea of just what is being done to us compared to New England's needs then a sensible response is extremely difficult.

For those who are interested, my posts on the previous Government's plan were:

• 14 November 2006, NSW Ten Year Plan - New England's needs
• 16 November 2006, Does the NSW Ten Year Plan meet New England's needs?
• 18 November 2006, NSW Ten Year Plan and New England - Conclusions 
• 19 November 2006, NSW Ten Year Plan - praiseworthy but flawed

Belshaw's World - can we harness local super?

Note to readers: This post appeared as a column in the Armidale Express on 24 August 2011. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because the Express columns are not on line. You can see all the columns by clicking here for 2009, here for 2010, here for 2011.

Did you know, I didn’t, that the top ten global technology companies ranked by market size had no less than $US 290.89 billion in cash and cash equivalents? Of this group, Apple has the largest cash horde of no less than $US 76.2 billion!

To relative size of the cash pile can be simply illustrated.

Google’s purchase of Motorola plus Microsoft’s purchase of Skype cost roughly $US 21 billion, a big number but also only 7.2 per cent of those companies’ combined cash reserves.

I am indebted for these strange pieces of information to a story from Alex Wilhelm (http://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/08/22/big-money-the-companies-with-the-biggest-cash-piles-in-tech/) on the The Next Web.

What does all this mean? Well, I’m not sure, but I can make a few comments.

To begin with, what do companies do with all this cash?

Part of the answer for, say, IBM is the need to provide working capital and a buffer in uncertain times. However, beyond that, the presence of such large cash reserves simply reflects the absence of decent investment opportunities.

One of the issues about scale is that as you get bigger, then you need to find bigger investment opportunities. You can’t get sufficient return given costs through a multiplicity of small investment opportunities.

We actually have a good example of this at present in Australia, and that’s superannuation.

I actually support compulsory superannuation, but our present system comes at a cost.

One cost is the diversion of savings away from local investments in areas like New England. In the past, local savings were more available to fund local investment. That’s no longer true.

Our compulsory superannuation is aggregated into large lumps. The superannuation funds cannot afford all the assessment and management costs associated with small regional investments, so the funds leave.

A second cost is the way that our retirement incomes have become dependant upon performance by a relatively small range of investment classes.

In a way we are our own worst enemies here for we focus on short term returns as compared to longer term sustainability. Yet when an asset class goes down, the suffering is concentrated on those most dependent, those who actually need cash now.

A third cost lies in the way that superannuation collections now exceed the value of immediately available Australian investments.

If you like, Australia is now experiencing what New England experienced earlier. Cash has to leave the country. There simply isn’t the range of local investment opportunities of the required size.

This problem has been compounded by the decline in the relative size of the Government debt marketplace. There just isn’t the range of Government securities of all types that there once were.

I have been wondering for some time about the possibilities of increasing variety in the superannuation marketplace. Not variety in the way normally expressed such as low fees super. These are macro, big scale issues that do nothing to address the type of issue that I am talking about.

Rather, I have been wondering about possible ways of increasing the number and variety of superannuation providers so that we all had more choice, so that there were more options of marshalling local or regional funds for local or regional purposes, more options for keeping Australian funds in Australia.

I am not talking here about things like quotas to force super funds to invest in particular ways. I don’t support these.

Rather, I am looking for changes to our present regulatory approaches that will make it easier for smaller and more varied funds to survive and grow,

I am well aware of issues such as risk, transparency and probity. I just don’t think it right that those from Northern NSW should be prevented from investing a proportion of their funds in local assets. I think that we should be given more real choice.

To do the type of thing that I am talking about actually requires a fundamental change in the way that Government regulates the superannuation industry. We have to move away from a one size fits all big is beautiful approach.

I would like to think that this was possible.

UK Daily Telegraph on Newcastle

My thanks to Greg for this one.

What has the Australian city of Newcastle got that Sydney and Melbourne haven’t?

According to the UK's Telegraph, its ramshackle glamour on apricot beaches!

It's actually not a bad story although, as some commenters pointed out, it still suffers from the confusion that you have to get to Newcastle from Sydney. That's not true, of course, given the flights from other cities to Newcastle. The story also fails to recognise that Newcastle is an entry point not just to the Hunter, but to the broader North.

Still, it's nice to see Newcastle and the Hunter getting further recognition.

New England Australia reader interests August 11

I am sorry for the continued lag in posting here. Hopefully full transmission will resume shortly!

The graphic shows visits (yellow) and page views (yellow plus red) on this blog to end August 11.

The most popular posts on this blog in August were:

• The Poetry of Judith Wright - South of My Days 268 page views
• Wednesday Forum: preserving New England's heritage. 50 page views
• Wednesday Forum: resolving environmental conflict 36 page views
• The Poetry of Judith Wright - Bora Ring 32 page views
• Round the New England blogging traps 10- a miscellany 25 page views
• Charles Sturt University to open in Tamworth?
• Round the New England blogging traps 24 - land, mining & the environment 19 page views
• New England Story - the making of Captain Thunderbolt 18 page views
• Armidale Kempsey Road Bullock Drays 1920s 17 page views

The popularity of South of My Days reflects the school curriculum!